Last week, the WiNoDa team met for its annual project meeting at the MfN in Berlin (thank you for your hospitality!). We are 20 people from 6 institutes – most of us were together in the same room for the first time in a year. Unfortunately, others could only join us via video conference this time. That didn’t stop us from working intensively on the upcoming formats for two days – 3/4 of the project period is already over: final sprint!
But because it’s good to pat yourself on the back sometimes, we started with a thorough review:
Most of our events take place online and in English, which has allowed us to build a large, international community. Of course, the focus is on Germany, but the UK, Scandinavia and other European countries are also well represented.. We even have visitors from Africa, Australia and the Americas – our bilingualism is clearly paying off!
Over the past two years, we have held 22 webinars, 5training courses on public engagement and the Winter School online. Most of these events were recorded and published on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@WiNoDaKnowledgeLab
In the coming months, further webinars and two online lecture series – ‘Ethics for Data in Sensitive Contexts’ and ‘Success Stories’ – will be added and announced here: https://winoda.de/en/events/
You can find traces of our in-person workshops and other live appearances on Zenodo, where 25 publications have already been released under the WiNoDa label: https://zenodo.org/communities/winoda/
Our helpdesk has answered over 50 individual enquiries and/or forwarded them to specialised experts, documenting the findings in a constantly growing knowledge base. Do you have any questions? Write to us! winoda@gfbio.org
Over the next few months, we will be offering six online courses for self-directed learning via a Moodle platform, which will also be published for full reuse as OER.
We are working on modular courses with units on data quality, data governance, data research and reusability, legal frameworks for collecting data in the field, data enrichment, automatic text recognition and open science…
https://winoda.de/de/educational-resources/
Through our website, this blog and social media, we can reach our community and successfully engage with them. We have just passed the 1,000 follower mark on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/winoda), and we have also been warmly welcomed on Mastodon https://nfdi.social/@WiNoDa.
Subscriptions to our monthly newsletter have increased by 164% compared to last year – click here to subscribe: https://lists.gbv.de/listinfo/winoda-newsletter
The review was not just for self-congratulation, but also for critical evaluation: what works? What should we keep, what do we need to change? And, of course, what does this mean for our planned events?
Because we have a lot planned for 2026: two edit-a-thons, a practical semester with open consultation hours and accompanying workshops to support the self-study courses, a hackathon, and of course the Summer School – we won’t run out of ideas anytime soon!
With all the work, there was still time for fun – for me, the highlight was visiting the exhibition ‘Building Community – Göbeklitepe, Taş Tepeler and Life 12,000 Years Ago’ at the James Simon Gallery. It was an impressive and lovingly designed exhibition about archaeological finds dating back up to 12,000 years.
Do you remember the Long Night of Science in 2025? We had already presented the excavations in a playful way with ‘Talk about Tepe’.
(We at WiNoDa have a special relationship with Göbeklitepe due to our research project, with the help of which my colleague is testing and documenting best practices for research with archaeobotanical data.
For this pilot study, she developed a new data model and contextualised 738 samples on our research platform with the help of 342 documents in 3 languages. Neat!)
I always find it particularly exciting to walk through an archaeological exhibition when someone who knows the excavation site is with me. You learn so many additional details! It was also amusing to observe the first signs of ‘professional deformation’ in some of us: during an informational film, we paid particular attention to the methods used to collect and document data on the objects during the excavations…
Now we’re ready to carry on with renewed motivation!
Building community. Göbeklitepe, Taş Tepeler and life 12,000 years ago
06.02.2026 to 19.07.2026, James-Simon-Galerie Berlin
https://www.smb.museum/en/exhibitions/detail/building-community/
As an academic staff at the DAI, my main responsibility for WiNoDa lies in the creation of self-study courses on discipline-specific data literacy.
Hands-on and interactive – my goal is: less technical jargon, more “aha” moments.
Because we are all working with data!