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Data Curation on the dataobservatory.eu Open Knowledge Platforms

1 Onboarding

This chapter contains the short, practical essentials for onboarding. If you need more inspiration about data curation, or you would like to read more about our work, please referr to the subsequent chapters.

You can become a curator by invitation to the project, or by applying in a short letter.

Your simplified resumé and profile picture. Take a look at profile of any Digital Music Observatory curators to see what we are aiming at.

You can download the Curatorial template from here.

Whatever is shown behind a # sign is a commentary to give you instructions how to fill in the form. You can delete those lines or leave in place, they will not be shown.

1.1 Minimum Requirements for Curators

  • Your biography must be machine readable. It consists of a TOML heading and markdown body. Change our template with any text editor. The editor should preferably not Word, or should save to standard text files in ‘UTF-8’ coding–non-English version Windows computers use your national character set by default, but you can always chose UTF-8 encoding in ⏺ Save as. Even if you are not familiar with these markups, by opening the template, it should be self explanatory. name: New Curators should be changed to name: <Your Name>

  • You must send a ⏺ profile picturethat is at least 500px wide (jpg or png format.) It can be bigger, and preferrably not a very “narrow” cut, as all avatars will be behind a ciruclar mask (see other curators.)

  • ORCiD Your ⏺ ORCiD ID, which will enable us to unambigously attribute your contributions. ORCiD is used in open science and other publishing to unambigously attribute copyrights and other intellectual property rights to a person. It takes a few minutes to register an account if you do not have it yet. We will attribute your name and ORCiD ID on all assets that you contribute to. It is particularly useful if your name has non-latin characters, your name is given in the Eastern name order, or your name has changed after marriage, etc.

  • At least one of these accounts where other contributors, curators can find you: a link to your LinkedIn, professional Twitter, professional Facebook, or Academia or Google Scholar account. Because of its diverse use among business, NGO and academic professionals, we recommend that you give a LinkedIn link.

  • You must abide the ⏯ Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct (but need not send us proof) of pledging 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. (See translations and the related FAQ.)

1.2 Communication and file sharing

If your contributions are occasional, probably you should use only Keybase to ask questions. If you will work with us frequently, or on more complex research outputs, it is best to use Github for simple project management (task tracking) and more complex file sharing, and Zotero for sharing bibliographic citations.

Keybase is our preferred tool to get in touch with us and ask questions, instead of emails, Whatsapp/Viber/Messenger/Telegram/Signal, that not everybody uses, and some people use for private matters only. Keybase is an open-source, free, privacy- and security-concerned alternative to Slack and similar chat-based collaboration tools. It is fully integrated with Zoom (which owns it recently) and Google Meet, so you can switch immediately to audio or video calls. Our observatories and Listen Local have their Keybase channels where you can interact with other curators and developers. ⇨ Annex / Collaboration tools / Keybase ⏯ keybase.io

Github, a Git-based open source and free service (currently owned by Microsoft) is our tool for a very simple task tracking in a kanban-style.

Image credit: Anyway Kanban

For tracking tasks, you only need a web browser and an account on Github. All project managers in our data observatories must have one, and curators are highly encouraged to join them, too. There are thousands of alternatives for Github’s kanban, but we use it, because it integrates well with a far better product than i.e., Microsoft Sharepoint, or Microsoft OneDrive, and Google Drive, or Drobox for sharing file resources, such a clear and processed documents, spreadsheets, SPSS files, website elements, media files.

Because Github is a more advanced tool for sharing files than the aforementioned shared drives (it prevents the creation of conflicting versions of the same text, table or photograph), and because it integrates with a simple task management, it is also far more complicated to set-up/install and learn. Github is a very simple for task management, to synchronize the file assets behind the tasks requires a bit of attention. But if you decide to go this way, you can build websites with us, blogs, publish journal articles, or even books. In scientific or open-source software cooperation using Github is fairly standard, so it will improve your ability to interact with colleagues. A curator does not need to use Github, unless he or she wants to cooperate on scientific outputs. ⏯ github.com

  • If you have an existing Github account, please give us your ⏺ Github account ID as the preferred way of exchanging files.
  • If you do not have one, please create a free account with a username that you would use professionally.
  • Please consider synching your files via Github with us after consulting our annex: ⏩ Annex / Collaboration tools / Github.
  • We can automate the issuing of DOI’s to all your figures, code, text automatically via Zenodo and Github.

1.3 Bibliography management

  • We use the open source, free Zotero research assistant. It can work with files created by Mendeley or OneNote. If you do not have a Zotero account, you should consider it after consulting our annex: ⏩ Annex / Collaboration tools / Zotero

  • For publications, we export (and slightly modify) citation data to BibLatex, a text format that is required for most scientific journal/book Tex templates. Because no research assistant exports precisely the same way, manual adjustment is always requires, so we keep up-to-date .bib collections on Github that are manually adjusted after exporting from Zotero, Mendeley, OneNote or downloaded directly from scientific libraries.

1.4 Domain specific issues

Our Digital Music Observatory and Cultural Creative Sectors Industries Data Observatory work with artists and creative professionals, or Green Deal Data Observatory and Competition Data Observatory with legal professionals. We try to accommodate the needs of curators from different professional communities.

1.4.1 Creative industries

In some of our music related projects, we need to use ⏺ Spotify, YouTube, Instagram accounts because they are used professionally. We can link these accounts to your profile if you use them in a professional capacity.

  • Spotify Account Link: You must have a free or premium account on Spotify. We will ask playlists initially on Spotify for ease of collaboration. If you do not use Spotify, you can create a free account for your Listen Local contributions.

1.4.2 Academia

We use ORCiD because we rely on Zenodo as an open source repository, but we can include almost any academic badge on your profile that you like, just make sure that you have an ORCiD ID, too.

Links and Identifiers You can optionally attach to your profile your LinkedIn profile, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube channel, Spotify Creator account, or anything that you use as a music professional—select at least one where artists can get in touch with you. Furtherore, for contributions to this project, we will need the following three identifiers from you: