Back in early 2020 the Bio-IT project took another step towards ensuring data privacy. Coupled with learning that different groups at EMBL had multiple independent subscriptions to a broad range of survey platforms, the Bio-IT project setup LimeSurvey locally and gained another powerful and reliable service. Since then, this platform has been used to collect feedback from hundreds of workshop attendees, inquire EMBL’s Python User Group (EPUG) and EMBL’s R User Group communities, and to run several internal surveys.

The EMBL Python User Group (EPUG) is a collective of python programmers at EMBL who meet regularly (every other Tuesday at 4 PM) to discuss python-related topics, demonstrate tools and modules, and experiment with python-related software and hardware. After the summer break, we reached out to the community to discuss EPUG format, addressed level of expertise, ideas for improvements and answer potential newcomers questions. This post includes a summary of what happened.

✈️ Hello, this is your community manager speaking. Bio-IT community manager, but - since recently - also Zenodo community manager. What does this mean? Here explained. FAIR, sustainable and (eventually) open science FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. It refers to a list of 15 principles published in The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship in 2016, aimed at “improving the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data”.

What? Well, a shared calendar 📆. Who? From Bio-IT, for you EMBLites 💚. When? All year long, update in real-time ⌚. Where? Online 💻 or on site 🏢, wherever something is happening. Why? Here’s why: The Bio-IT calendar The Bio-IT calendar lists courses, events, and activities open to all EMBL members. You can simply consult it there or add it to your EMBL calendar. This is a friendly calendar of things you may want to do - not of things you have to do, of opportunities to interact with EMBL researchers and learn new skills.

“CommunityRule is a governance toolkit for great communities”. The website homepage provides this definition, and then challenges you with two questions: How does your community work? Are you ready to make hard decisions? Defining our governance structure The purpose of the CommunityRule project is to make you think about how your community is organised, who is in charge of making decisions and who can influence this decisions. The project is still work in progress, but a wide range of definitions and tags is already available - even if not all of them are thoroughly described - to define your community governance structure.

EMBL provides an ownCloud server with (as of March 2021) 50GiB of storage for every EMBL user. To access it navigate to oc.embl.de and login using your EMBL credentials. An alternative to Google Docs/Drive You can use this system much like Google Docs or Google Drive by storing and sharing files or using the built in tools to edit documents. Programmatic access Besides public and private links for download and upload, Owncloud provides a WebDAV interface that can be used for programmatic access.

Initially proposed as an EMBL’s coding club collaborative programming project, the EMBL Bio-IT chat bot, avidly named BIT, took off in 2020 and is already diligently announcing courses and workshops in the Bio-IT-announce channel. Introducing BIT With a modular design, allowing for anyone to contribute new behavior with very little code, BIT, EMBL’s Bio-IT chat bot, is slowly gaining new abilities and showing its usefulness. As of 2021 it already assists EMBL’s Git admin team on specific administrative tasks and monitors EMBL and Bio-IT services keeping us up to date with changes.

EMBL’s (Bio-IT) chat has been initiated in 2017 to facilitate internal real-time interactions between people at EMBL, to promote group discussions and sharing of information. As of 2021 more than 1000 users are registered with over 120 active daily. In part due to the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic situation, the platform gained particular relevance and became a central hub for communication between members of all EMBL sites. The platform effectively became a pan-EMBL service in 2021, welcoming EMBL-EBI, that would join all other EMBL sites.

This quick tutorial shows you how to connect GitLab at EMBL with a Slack workspace. This can be very useful when you want to stay informed about activities in your repository without having to check your emails all the time - in fact, you may decide to disable email notifications for the repository because Slack notifications are quicker to see, manage and act upon! This tutorial also shows you the power of so-called webhooks!