Introduction of the Living Atlases workshop

Since 2010 the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) gives information on all the known species in Australia and contributes to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). To provide a suitable framework for national needs, ALA and GBIF worked together and created a technical community around the platform developed by ALA. This one is called Living Atlases. Through this community, members can be helped during the installation and configuration of modules based on this architecture by the ALA technical team or other participants. Since 2013, several beginner and advanced workshops have been made focusing on various ALA tools. Because the level of the community members has increased, some former trainees have become new trainers. Added to these technical workshops, we have been able to present and demonstrate our work during international conferences with always the main goal to show how re-using an existing software can be motivating and stimulating as well as be part of a living community. Indeed, ten institutions members to Living Atlases launched their national data portal. In the future, we expect more GBIF nodes to put their software in production (Andorra, Germany, Benin, Luxembourg, etc.). During this introduction, we will present the community by showing past events as well as presentations done during previous conferences. Then, we will describe the human aspect of the project by presenting the international community and listing some key points of the software such as internationalization or customization. We will finish it by explaining the future of the Living Atlases community and how you can contribute and be part of it