Help us curate data – tell us what sort of information is missing from your research agenda. Challenge us and collaborate with us in the crafting of valuable datasets that combine domain knowledge with reproducible, open data research practices.

Curatorial Expectations

• Your first contribution can be made without writing a single program code – but if you are experienced in reproducible science, than you can also submit a code that creates your data.

• Great new data products are always made out of some relevant, professional, often playful curiosity to our topics. If you have that curiosity in the field of economic policies, particularly in computational antitrust, innovation research, and understanding the statistically under-represented micro- and small enterprises, join our Economy Data Observatory curatorial team. If you have an interest in environmental research of climate change, designing urban, social and economic mitigation strategies, or undertanding how people think about climate change, join our Green Deal Data Observatory curatorial team. If you are interested in music, musicians, or etchical, trustworthy AI and data governance issues, join our Digital Music Observatory curatorial team. This last observatory is dealing with data governance issues, too, showcase experience from the music industry.

Get inspired

• Send us a plain language document, preferably in any flavor of markdown (See subchapter @ref(markdown) in the Tools), or even in a clear text email about the indicator. What should the indicator be used for, how it should be measured, with what frequency, and what could be the open data source to acquire the observations. Experienced data scientists can send us a Jupiter Notebook or an Rmarkdown file with code, but this submission can be a simple plain language document without numbers.

• Sometimes we put our hands on data that looks like a unique starting point to create a new indicator. But our indicator will be flawed, if the original dataset is flawed. And it can be flawed in many ways, most likely that some important aspect of the information was omitted, or the data is autoselected, for example, under-sampling women, people of color, or observations from small or less developed countries. See our curatorial handbook on how to remain critical.

• Experienced programmers are welcome to participate in our developer team, and become contributors, or eventually co-authors of the (scientific) software codes that we make to continuously improve our data observatories. All our data code is open source. At this level, you are expected to be able to raise and/or pick up and solve an issue in our observatory’s Github repository, or its connecting statistical repositories.

Technical Requirements

You can find a checklist with all we need in the github/dataobservatory-eu repostitory. Make sure that you read the Contributors Covenant. You must make this pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation. Participating in our data observatories requires everybody to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community. It’s better this way for you and for us!

• Name, affiliation, education details, one-line and short biography. Please, send back this bio_template.txt text file with your details or, if you know markdown, use this version. The files are identical, but your word processor may not know how to open an .md file.

• Your ORCiD to resolve ambiguity with similarly named people. You may use different library or publication service IDs, such as Google Scholar, Publeon, etc, you may provide them, too, but we do need an ORCiD ID, because most of the EU open science infrastructure and the R ecosystem uses this one. If you do not have it, please create one—it only takes a few minutes. Please add it to the bio_template.txt.

• Your LinkedIn ID, add it to the bio_template.txt.

• Your Github account name. If you do not have one, please create one. As a data curator, you may not need it, but if you contribute in our R&D or publication efforts, you will need it.

• Your Keybase account name. If you do not have one, please create one, if you want to be able to chat with us, or exchange calls, data with us in a discrete, free, open-source and secure environment. Keybase is an open-source substitute for Slack. It is owned by Zoom and it can start Zoom or Google Meet calls.

• Any other social media that you use strictly professionally.

• You should follow our file naming conventions, and avoid the use of special characters in any file names at all times: , $, :,;,,,., ", ' tick or backtick.

• Please send us one professional portrait of at least 400x400 pixels.

• Please, follow us on social media, it really helps us finding new users and showing that we are able to grow our ecosystem.

  • Green Deal Data Observatory on Linkedin and Green Deal Data Observatory on Twitter
  • Economy Data Observatory on Linkedin and Economy Data Observatory on Twitter
  • Digital Music Data Observatory on Linkedin and Digital Music Data Observatory on Twitter

• If you write code in R or Python, connect to us via Github.

More about contributing: Automated Observatory Contributors’ Handbook.