SFG Community Norms

Last updated 2025-1-5.

Intent

This is not a legal document. It is a living and evolving set of ideas that we hope strengthens our collective impact when engaged through participation. It will certainly change. Your participation might involve joining community meetings and events, using TaxonWorks software, using Species File Group powered applications such as our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), using our TaxonPages software, and publishing data to or using data downloaded from SFG-related projects. Your engagement with these norms as part of your individual and community standards-of-practice contributes to building an ethical, thriving, and evolving community. The intent is to support recognition of expertise, facilitating credit and attribution for work done, to intentionally focus digital efforts towards meeting the needs of life (and not vice-versa), to manage expectations, to provide transparency, and to minimize the distance between biodiversity data and scientific outcome.

Ideas

In koan spirit

• All data publishers should get the credit they deserve when the data they curate are used by others.
• When administrators of scientific effort value re-use of data maintained from their organization as they value contribution to the primary literature, then benefits emerge.
• Giving credit, a social construct, is both an ethical process that must be taught and learned and a canonical way to provide provenance within the scientific method.
• Enforcing credit-giving is evidence of a systemic failure.
• Facilitating credit-giving should permeate our scientific processes.
• Expertise, experts, and the hard work that they emerged from are worth celebrating.
• The concepts of repeatability, iteration, and hypothesis testing within the scientific method benefit greatly when the underlying software and practices are open-source. Some closed software and processes are not scientific because they negate the possibility of these processes.
• Problems with data represent opportunities for improvement. Openly sharing data is a good way to discover these opportunities.
• Factual data cannot be copyrighted (e.g. date collected, locality data, who collected a given object). Factual data should be committed to the Public Domain. For more see context at Plazi.
• Data providers have the right to protect any creative content, including, but not limited to images, sound files, videos, and descriptive/speculative text, where applicable.
• Data standards should evolve from practice, and practice benefits from data standards, neither should have primacy.
• Data are strengthened when effort is taken to place them in a context whose understanding is shared.
• Data standards are a basis for shared understanding.
• Well standardized data is an act of sharing understanding.
• The acts of standardizing data without understanding does not create standardized data.
• Publishing in a human language is a form of standardization.
• Scientific publications, by definition, contain novelty, as such they frequently address that which has no standard.
• All standards have limits, because of the vastness of biodiversity there are no universal standards, at best we have useful ones.
• Standardized licences for data are useful for standardized data for all the reasons standards for data are useful.
• Creative Commons Zero (CC0) is a particularly useful license as it is the least limiting, and therefore pre-adapts data for re-use, synthesis, improvement, and integration into broader biological concepts.
• Making data easy to use but hard to understand is not as beneficial as making data easy to understand but hard to use.
• Life on earth is full of compartments, variously hidden from one another, it seems reasonable to expect data to follow similar patterns.
• Completely compartmentalized life fails to become life relatively quickly, and fails to sustain other life, perhaps the same can be said for data, though generalizations (e.g. “silos” vs “free without limits”) have little koan flavour.
• It’s OK to re-invent wheels, how else would we know we got it right?
• Transparency helps. See Working with us for some regarding how SFG decides to collaborates.
• The loop is humans, and life. “AI in the loop”, not “Humans in the loop”.
• Voucher. Without vouchers AI wins, with them AI works.
• Codes of Conduct are worth pursuing for their contributions to scientific ethics, and the protection of all of our diversity. SFG has used, uses, and will evolve their use depending on context. If you are unsure of the context and experience an issue while engaging our community start by contacting our Community Liaison Deborah Paul.
• Be kind.

Acknowledgements

Deborah Paul wrote a first draft. Matt Yoder refactored that. SFG has collectively improved it since then.

There are many communities providing documents like this, here are some that inspired this effort and that we drew from, from scientific realms and beyond:

• Canadensys
• Vertnet
• MCDM Community Guidelines

We are happy to add to this list, let us know.