On behalf of the OpenPlanetary team, we would like to wish you all an happy new year! May it be a year of fruitful collaborations, personal achievements and scientific discoveries — What could you wish for OpenPlanetary in 2017?
From the beginning OpenPlanetary (OP) has been, and will always be, an effort by and for the planetary science community. We, the OpenPlanetary team, are a small group of volunteers passionate about fostering Open Science practices and a collaborative spirit within the planetary science community. In 2017, we intend to keep experimenting to help and be useful to you: the community, but we always need your feedback, suggestions, and contributions.
Where OpenPlanetary is heading to depends on you!
Our Blog
We have been really pleased with the success of our blog since we launched it 4 months ago. Thank to many contributors, we managed to publish a new post every week and get a fair amount of readers, with 1728 users in total and 47% returning visitors:
We won’t stop here.
- We will be preparing a blog post/tutorial series on handling digital planetary data.
- We will redesign our website to make our blog more engaging, readable and searchable.
- We will make it easier for authors to push content to our blog on GitHub.
- We will try and provide some further support for collaborative research and data handling/processing/analysis, including practical documentation.
In this respect, any input is welcome, both from inside and outside OP.
Call for authors
Use our public Trello board to suggest and vote for blog posts to come you would like to read. Volunteer to (cross-)post in our blog: get in touch with us on Slack, or send us an email.
New ideas
New ideas of collaborative projects are sprouting within the OP community. Among those there are: PlanetaryPy, an initiative to create a consolidated planetary science Python package (read post), and OpenPlanetaryMap (OPM), an initiative to build an Open Planetary Mapping platform for researchers, educators, and the general public (read post)
A Planetary Mapping and Virtual Observatory workshop is coming up (see website). Remote participation through Slack is planned already. So is an hackathon component. More on this in a post very soon.
A first online Ask Me Anything (AMA) event to discuss the new ESA’s Planetary Science Archive (PSA) web interface (here) will be announced very soon too.
Stay tuned and thanks in advance for your feedback!
— The OpenPlanetary Team