hello i'm sally kleinfeld from jazz carta and i'd like to talk about collaborative data management scientists and researchers researchers of all kinds produce data data which needs to be managed

project data often start out in a spreadsheet or access database if the research team is big enough the next step is often a web database with a user interface for data entry and reporting that solves the data management needs of many projects however when different team members need different kinds of data access

simple data management is not enough for example some team members might enter data while others review and publish it on a botany or ecology project some people may be responsible for entering field data and others for entering lab data about the same organism some data fields

may be so sensitive that only a few people are allowed access an example of this is the location of a rare or endangered plant and these kinds of projects often need other collaboration features as well the team may need to share things like pdf files photographs calendars and general

information such projects require more than data management they need a system that also supports collaboration i call this collaborative data management there are no off-the-shelf collaborative data management system so the question

is how can we create one as a general rule data management systems can be pretty simple but collaboration systems by their nature are more complex they need to manage user groups and roles they need to provide workflows so information can be private or published and they need to provide fine-grained

access control which can be based on location role workflow state data type even individual data fields because of this adding advanced collaboration and access control features to a data management system would be a lot of work but adding data

management to the right collaboration system can be straightforward what is the right collaboration system plone is the perfect collaboration system to add data management features to

plan is rich in collaboration features out of the box it provides member roles workflows fine-grained placeful access control permission sensitive search and many other features and it's very easy to define and add

custom content types to plone which are perfect for capturing project data in plone custom content types can have any number of data fields extensive vocabularies there can be many different types of fields strings integers rich text images even

geolocations custom types can even act like a folder and contain any number of files images and other content objects let's look at an example of a collaborative data management system built with plone the north american orchid conservation center is a coalition of

organizations dedicated to conserving north america's diverse orchid heritage as part of their conservation mission they're developing national collections of orchids and their seeds the collections are managed at collaborating

institutions where analysis preservation and propagation work takes place lots and lots of data is captured about each orchid in the field and in the lab and different groups of people perform different tasks collaborating botanists enter data

and submit it for review admins review and publish the data then other collaborators can see some of the published data but not all of it whereas anonymous users can't see any of the data at all

in addition to the data everyone needs to share project documents news events and other types of information let's look at the results with minimal development effort jessicarta provided all the features

naok asked for plus a whole lot more that just came out of the box on a very simple clone site here's what the site looks like to anonymous users they see they can see the home page and some public reports news and events

and here's what the site looks like to an admin user notice that additional sections of the site are now available on the top navigation menu the section containing the orcid data a section where they can search for other users and see their shared information

and a section for collaborators to share documents events etc you can also see a toolbar on the left allowing them to add edit and publish content and perform other administrative functions a big thank you to naok they funded this

work as an open source project thus making it available to other organizations that wanted a similar system this kind of easy collaborative data management is just one of the ways plone is a great tool for scientific research if you browse the playlists on the plone cms

youtube channel for world plan day or the plone conferences you'll find other examples of scientists and researchers taking advantage of plone's rich set of features on their projects and feel free to reach out to me

if you'd like more information about neocs collaborative data management systems thanks