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

• 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!

• Make sure that you have and ORCiD ID. This is a standard identification for scientific publications. We need your numeric ORCiD ID.

• Make sure that you have a Zenodo account which is connected to your ORCiD ID. This enables you to publish data under your name. If you curate data for our observatories, you will be the indicator’s first author, and depending on what processes help you, the author of the (scientific) code that helps you calculate the values will be your co-author.

• Give users at least one social media account where they can get in touch with you (any of LinkedIn, Twitter, Academia, SSRN, Google Scholar, or even Facebook.)

• 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.

• If you feel you need chatting on onboarding, contact us on Keybase - it’s lightweight, discrete, encrypted, your mother, partner and friends are not there, it is free, open source, and can share/exchange files, too. Otherwise in email.