Collaboration is at the heart of the OpenCon community.  Our global conference, satellite events, and community calls are all meant to be opportunities for those who are passionate about advancing openness in research and education to connect, find collaborators for their work, and discover new ways to get involved with Open projects. But beyond our community events, we realized we didn’t have a place online for people to discover ways to get involved with community projects or look for collaborators.

To address this, a few weeks ago, we launched a new page on our site: OpenCon Community Collaborate. This is a platform for connecting projects in the OpenCon community that are in need of collaborators, with people in the community looking to get involved with Open projects.

OpenCon Community Collaborate accelerates the impact of ideas, individuals, projects and organizations by connecting them and providing a range of support. This is a digital space for students, researchers, librarians, early career academics, and advocates around the world to connect with each other on Open issues.  

In this iteration of the platform, there are three ways you can use OpenCon Community Collaborate:   

1. Browse - and get involved with - existing Open projects!

Getting involved in an Open initiative can sometimes be intimidating. Or maybe you want to help out, but you just don’t know where to start. To address this, we’ve created a directory of existing projects (at various stages of development) that are looking for help from collaborators and volunteers! Each project listing provides a brief summary of the project’s activities, as well as more specific information on what kind of help and skills they are looking for. If you’re interested in getting involved, all you need to do is email the project contact in the listing. 

We’re excited to share that we’ve already had a number of community members list a wide range of projects across Open issue areas, from the Rebus Community - an open textbook project, to Project Cognoma - an open source project that’s looking to create a webapp to analyze cancer data, and many more!   

2. Share your project with us.

If you’re working on a project related to Open Research or Open Education and are seeking collaborators, we are happy to promote it by list it on our Collaborate community projects directory for others to discover! Projects listed under Community Collaborate can be at any stage of development, but our only request is that your project goals are clearly defined and that you have a good idea of what kind of help you’d be requesting from collaborators.  

Interested? Submit a request to get your project up on our website using this form.

3. Connect directly with people in your region, with the skills you need.

We have an enormous, and detailed, database of students, librarians, researchers, and advocates, across a number of regions, with a broad range of skills in the OpenCon community.  If you’re looking for someone with a specific skillset, or based out of a specific country to collaborate with on your Open project, we can help you! We’ll do our best to connect you with potential collaborators after you submit a request using this form. 

We are looking to continue building on, and improving OpenCon Community Collaborate, so if you have any suggestions on how the platform could be better suit your needs, please let us know at lorraine(at)sparcopen.org

This month's OpenCon community call will be themed around collaboration and community support for projects and initiatives advancing Open! We’ll hear about some exciting projects happening in the OpenCon community that are looking for help & support. Interesting in speaking about your project during this call? Please let lorraine(at)sparcopen.org know!  

The call will take place on Wednesday, April 26 at 12 PM ET / 4 PM UCT / 5 PM BST / 6 PM CEST  . You can RSVP here.