Standards in Action: The Darwin Core Hour

Darwin Core Wieczorek et al. 2012 has become broadly used for biodiversity data sharing since its ratification as a standard in 2009. Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, questions about Darwin Core, its definitions, and its applications continue to arise. However, no easy mechanism previously existed for the users of the standard to ask their questions and to have them answered and documented in a strategic and timely way. In order to close this gap, a double-initiative was developed: the Darwin Core Hour (DHC) Darwin Core Hour Team 2017a and the Darwin Core Questions & Answers Site Darwin Core Hour Team 2017b. The Darwin Core Hour Zermoglio et al. 2017 is a webinar series in which particular topics concerning the Darwin Core standard and its use are presented by more experienced and vested community members for the benefit of and discussion amongst the community as a whole. All webinars are recorded for broader accessibility. The Darwin Core Questions & Answers Site is a GitHub repository where questions from the community are submitted as issues, then discussed and answered in the repository as a means of building up documentation. These two instances are tightly linked and feed each other Fig. 1.Questions from the community, some arising during the webinars, turn into issues and are then answered and shaped into documentation, while some questions give birth to new webinar topics for further discussion. So far, this double-initiative model has proved useful in bringing together communities from different geographic locales, levels of expertise, and degrees of involvement in open dialogue for the collaborative evolution of the standard. At the time of this presentation, the group has produced nine webinar sessions and provided a corpus of documentation on several topics. We will discuss its current status, origins and potential of the double-initiative model, community feedback, and future directions, in addition to inviting the TDWG community to join efforts to keep the Darwin Core standard "in action"