Working with us

Last updated 2025-1-5.

There is a lot to do in biodiversity informatics. SFG fields enquiries on a weekly basis regarding working with us. These may be about using a particular software package or tools we support, how to solve a data migration problem, what to write into a grant, how to grow our community, or how to understand a data standard. As our mission is to maximize the impact of our resources we do our best to engage everyone who comes to us. Our level of engagement comes down to, in part, how we prioritize. In the spirit of transparency here’s some of the considerations that go into our process.

Don’t be overwhelmed, this is an evolving summary derived from well over a decade of conversations. If you’re starting out it’s better to ask then to assume you don’t fit. This isn’t a strict set of criteria, it’s things we think about.

• Shared norms - If everyone was identical things would be boring, however working with people thinking along the same lines is fun, and we all need fun.
• Goodness of fit - We like our tools and team, but they may not fit your needs, and we might not have the expertise needed to contribute meaningfully in a collaboration. A conversation about fit benefits us all, we get to see emerging needs, you understand our strengths and weaknesses.
• Timeliness - We may have features planned, or be willing to add a dataset into our migration pipeline, but will they be ready for your deadlines?
• Nature of the data
  • Blank slate - If no existing data are in place starting a TaxonWorks project (for example) is not bottlenecked by SFG time.
  • Legacy - We highly value data with decades of curatorial decisions behind it, regardless of whether its future is crystal clear.
  • Gaps - Missing puzzle pieces are important to us and our collaborators such as the Catalogue of Life (e.g. species checklists) and GBIF (e.g. small to medium collections).
  • Depth - Rich, complex data is both a good fit for our extensibility and of particular interest to us in terms of academic modelling challenges.
  • Size - We are not YouTube. If your project is going to quickly grow past multiple terabytes we may discuss with you how you can contribute to our storage capacity.
  • Synergy - We have particular strengths in existing data (e.g. insects) and tools (e.g. taxonomy, digitization). That strength may be multiplied if incoming data or efforts have clear intersections (e.g. one project is hosts, another parasites) or extensions (e.g. new classes of data within our scope).
• Collaborators - We don’t see ourselves as service providers for users. We value your input, feedback, and attention to detail, and hope you share it with us and our broader community.
• Community - Past, present, and future
  • Continuity - Are incoming collaborators seeking to persist long-running scientific efforts?
  • Activity - Is data in its present state (if present) evolving and/or being actively maintained?
  • Flexibility - Our projects, like all, follow conventions (e.g. data models, ways of doing things). Being open to the changes that these might bring to your existing workflows is important. We want to learn and adapt to how you work, we want you to learn and adapt so that others benefit.
  • Patience - Migration, community building, and new features take time, this scales with the size and degree of past curation. Expert systems, like ours, take time to learn to maximize their utility.
  • Initiative - Have collaborators independently accessed our resources to learn, test, and play with tools like sandboxes or datasets?
  • Participation - Are collaborators currently engaging in our open channels for example issue-trackers, weekly meetings, chat, TaxonWorks Together, and pull-requests on documentation? Are they talking with the broader community about what we do?
  • Communicators - We greatly appreciate people and projects that engage and are willing to passionately share their experiences, good or bad.
  • Openness - Communities dedicated to the conversation of making data, tools, and processes open are compelling collaborators.
  • Diversity - Sharing ideas, data-types, data, skill-sets, and frames-of-reference help us innovate and adapt.
  • Growth - Would collaboration catalyze growth of incoming efforts? Is the potential collaboration open to expanding their community, thereby increasing the size of those who can maintain and grow an effort over the long-term? Efforts that seek to grow from single individual efforts, for example, to communities with shared, over-lapping and complementary skill-sets fit well with our efforts.
• Developers - We try to prioritize working with collaborating projects that bring in developers or individuals offering to contribute.
• Funding - Your effort to bring funding, matching or novel, to the table catches our ear.
• Innovation - We value exploring new things from new domains and seek to balance this exploration with our day-to-day efforts.
• Considering alternatives - We want you to consider alternatives to our software (e.g. Symbiota, Specify, Arctos) and skillsets. Making informed choices benefits the broader community regardless of where they land.
• Sustainability - Before you get in, have a plan for getting out. What does yours look like?

Process

A typical collaboration starts by reaching out, perhaps after reading some documentation (TaxonWorks, GlobalNames). We will setup a TaxonWorks Sandbox account if that’s useful to you. You may bring questions to our weekly support meetings. At some point you’ll want to engage more directly if you are leaning to collaborating. We’ll have a deeper conversation during our support meetings or “in-person”. At that point we’ll cover a good number of the topics above. We’ll ask about the history, size, and complexity of your data, parallel efforts to yours, and your existing infrastructure, having this summarized and at hand helps greatly. In the case of TaxonWorks, after further reflection, possibly research into existing efforts, etc. we’ll ask you acknowledge reading TaxonWorks in Production at the SFG. On acknowledgement we’ll create a “production” project, and you’re ready to go. If you have significant (i.e. data curated for multiple years) data we’ll discuss options for how you might migrate it. Grand funding can prioritize migration process, we typically estimate 2-3 months of full time funding for our senior project members for most medium-large projects. If your data are in the 5-10k record range we will likely recommend a combination of batch uploading and curation. We’re happy to help you learn how to script-load the data as well (on a priority basis- you’re learning new skills, we can help there).

If you’re asking about collaborating on grant, using TaxonWorks on your own, joining us for TaxonWorks Together, or any of many other reasons we’ll have a conversation just like you would would other collaborators.