Community

Draft: The content on this page has not been finalized. Contributors can mark a page as complete and remove this warning by adding status: published to the front matter in the Markdown source file.

This website is brought to you by the Paleo Data Working Group (PDWG, pronounced “pidwig”), which is a community of practice centered around collections-based paleo and informatics professionals. PDWG was launched in May 2020 as a driving force for broader conversations about paleontological data standards and integration of fossil data into larger data ecosystems. PDWG formed as a result of a decade of increasing collaboration between paleontology professionals digitizing their collections, including as part of an earlier Paleo Digitization Working Group hosted by iDigBio. Current activities include regular “happy hour” meetings, workshops, community outreach, and engagement with parallel groups and processes. We also maintain a community pipeline for carrying conversation through to documentation and guidelines, such as those curated in this knowledge hub. COntact us at paleodatawg@gmail.com.

How to get involved

Any and all paleontology collections professionals are encouraged to join the PDWG community. We use the following tools for this community of practice…

Slack: Our primary tool for asynchronous conversations/discussions about topics or ask questions on anything digitization- or collections management-related. To join the Slack workspace click here. If you are unfamiliar with Slack, see this 3-minute video overview of how to use it up for the Paleo Data workspace.

Google Group: A listserv where we post announcements about upcoming happy hours, workshops, or other events of interest. Request to join the Google Group here.

GitHub: We have a newly established presence on GitHub here. Please stayed tuned as we determine how GitHub will integrated into our existing suite of community tools.

Google Drive: Our shared folder on Google Drive is a place where we can store working documents that do not fit well on GitHub yet. Please request access if you think you should be enabled to edit files in this folder.).

List of institutions and people involved

Members of PDWG come from a wide range of institutions, including independent museums to university collections to representatives from US federal agencies. Currently members of this group are largely US-based, though with some international (and very welcome) participation.

The PDWG logo is of our working group mascot, the trilocorn (i.e. a trilobite + a unicorn). The trilocorn lives and thrives in our souls, encouraging us to be the best data and collections managers we can be. Consider the trilocorn to be the patronus of paleo collections, protecting their staff against the slippery slope of data chaos.