Project Website:

EMBL Bio-IT: https://bio-it.embl.de/



License: GNU Free Documentation License



Abstract:



Bio-IT (https://bio-it.embl.de) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) (https://embl.org) is a community-driven initiative established in 2010 to support the development and technical capacity of its diverse bio-computational community. There has been a consistent increase in the number of researchers who use computational techniques in their work in the last decade. As of now, ~50% of researchers at EMBL (out of ~600) devote ≥50% of their time to computational work. Several of these members are service staff who dedicate their time to building or maintaining computational infrastructure and providing computational support to others. The Bio-IT community at EMBL has grown organically, aiming to address the various computational needs in research on campus.



As community coordinators of Bio-IT, we provide support to our members by conducting training events on computing skills, developing/maintaining resources for reproducible science, adopting best practices in our workflow, and creating diverse opportunities for open discussions, participation, and networking. EMBL is a member of de.NBI, the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure, which constitutes ELIXIR Germany. This allows Bio-IT to disseminate its resources to different ELIXIR states. Additionally, we collaborate with other Open Science communities such as The Carpentries, Software Sustainability Institute, and Mozilla to exchange expertise, share resources and bring valuable aspects of the larger and more diverse communities into Bio-IT.



In all these efforts, I work at the intersection of community building, bio-computation, and inclusion of underrepresented groups in STEM. In my talk, I will highlight the importance of inclusiveness in open science communities and share some of the lessons learned while adopting them in my work. This talk will benefit other community managers and researchers interested in creating local or virtual sustainable communities and will stimulate discussions around inclusion and representation in technical fields such as computational biology.