The Symbiota Support Hub has completed its first year as iDigBio’s 6th Domain funded by NSF Award 2027654. Here’s what we accomplished:
Summary
In Year 1, Domain 6 (D6) established and grew the Symbiota Support Hub (SSH), led by PIs Franz, Gilbert, and Yost. This growth included hiring three staff (Pearson, Post, Walker) and recruiting two unfunded partners (Prado, Orellana). The SSH hosts 34 portals containing 80+ million occurrences and 1.2+ million images from 1,500+ collections. In Year 1, we established core services by: installing and configuring a new Help Desk ticketing system (help.symbiota.org), creating help and documentation websites for the Symbiota user community (Symbiota.org, Symbiota Docs, Symbiota Discussions, and the SSH YouTube channel), initiating Portal Advancement Campaigns, and leading monthly Support Group webinars. We now use GitHub as our central code repository to track issues and code developments (funded through other sources), including API infrastructure. D6 actively supports 4 new TCNs and continues to engage previous TCNs through Portal Advancement Campaigns. In Year 1, D6 responded to 512 Help Desk inquiries from 242 individuals at over 160 institutions (34 portal communities). Through the campaigns, D6 added 2 new collections to Symbiota-based portals and facilitated 11 collections’ publishing to GBIF and iDigBio. D6 participates in virtual TCN and one-on-one support meetings. IT infrastructure has been improved and is now supported by IT Manager Post. In March 2022, the SSH joined GBIF as an Associate Participant, which enabled D6 to endorse collections as data publishers. Other significant synergistic activities include outreach to international portal communities and code development with the NEON project.
See you in Year 2!