The New Living Atlases Community

Abstract

The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is an online platform that aggregates and gives access to data about Australian biodiversity. For a few years, it has worked with international partners to enhance, translate, and export its robust and modular infrastructure to other institutions. Thanks to several projects and technical workshops, we have managed to make this community durable. Through our journey to create a more structured and sustainable community, we have completed two significant milestones. The first was the creation of the Management Committee, which included the hiring of a technical coordinator and an administrative coordinator. Both are working together to improve documentation, communication, and help participants with technical and non-technical issues or questions. This has resulted in six new deployments of the Living Atlases infrastructure. The second was the establishment of a Memorandum of Understanding to provide structure for the community and explain what we should expect from our participants, the coordinators, and the Management Committee. During this presentation, we will give an overview of what we have done, focusing particularly on what helped us grow in recent years, and our next steps to ensure that this community remains durable.