A growing network exerts pressure on existing capacity even as it holds the promise of greater future capacity. To meet escalating demands and opportunities, GBIF piloted an approach to capacity building focused on regional-scale communities of practice better able to distribute support for data mobilization and use across individual, institutional and regional scales.
New regional support teams in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia have complemented national node staff and increased both outreach and help desk services for people and projects, particularly those in countries that are not yet members of GBIF. Between 2021 and 2022, eight regional contractors attended 116 workshops while peer-reviewing 242 BID- and BIFA-mobilized datasets. The Asian team also relied on updated training courses to self-organize a successful virtual workshop. Together, the three teams instilled a cohort of several hundred professionals with data skills and confidence—promising early results that respond to a recommendation to stabilize and extend the regional network in CODATA’s Twenty-Year Review of GBIF.
Expanding the participant map requires speaking to other countries in their own terms, as well as on them. Dozens of volunteer translators took that charge literally, localizing GBIF.org’s user interface and key content in all five non-English UN languages (Arabic, Simplified Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) along with Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Ukrainian.
