Building on last year's successful pilot phase, GBIF and DataCamp Donates have renewed their partnership into 2023, extending the GBIF community's free, unlimited access to training materials and resources that have become a vital component of the Data Use Club.
The partnership aligns with DataCamp's philosophy and GBIF's strategic priorities, promoting interactions between data users while providing them with tools to develop their data literacy skills.
The Data Use Club, which started just over a year ago, offers seminars and practical sessions supported by self-directed online training through DataCamp. More than 100 people have benefited from the platform's online courses, many of them through teams organized in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Uganda, Colombia, Benin, Taiwan, Kenya, Malaysia and the Dominican Republic.
"DataCamp has been essential for our internal data workflow and has enabled us to support a growing community of users interested in open biodiversity data use within our country," said Camila Plata, content management team leader at SiB Colombia, the GBIF national node for Colombia.
"DataCamp is proud and honored to work with GBIF to provide free, world-class data science education to their network of hundreds of biologists and technologists, so they can more effectively collect, study, and share insights from open data on biodiversity," said Nathaniel Taylor-Leach, social impact manager at DataCamp. "Along with helping the DataCamp Donates program achieve its mission of democratizing data science education for all, GBIF is a glorious example of the fantastic work humanity can do when governments cast their boundaries aside to study and celebrate the profound diversity of planet Earth."
Access to DataCamp will remain open to those within the GBIF community interested in developing their data literacy skills with more than 400 online courses on technologies like Python, R and SQL, among others. Interested individuals and organizations within the GBIF participant countries and economies in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Northern Eurasia and the Pacific are invited to apply to the programme on an ongoing basis.
"It's immensely satisfying to see how the partnership with DataCamp Donates has enabled biodiversity professionals around the world to gain access to training in key data skills with the support of the GBIF community," said Andrew Rodrigues, programme officer for participation and engagement at the GBIF Secretariat.