The DJango Academic Community Platform (DJAC): An open-source website for transparent discussion, collaboration and management in an academic community

Collaboration Platforms for harmonization and building a shared understanding of communities are essential components in today's academic environment. With the help of modern software tools and advancing digitization, our communities can improve collaboration via event, project and file management, and communication. The variety of tasks and tools needed in interdisciplinary communities, however, pose a considerable obstacle for community members. We see them in the administration, and especially when on-boarding new members with different levels of experience (from student to senior scientist). Here, user-friendly, technical support is needed. We are involved in many communities, particularly in the Climate Limited-area Modelling Community (CLM-Community) and the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC). With the input of these (and more) communities, we are currently working on the DJAC-Platform, an open-source, Python (Django)-based website. DJAC manages communities from a single institute to an (inter-)national community with hundreds and more participating research institutions. DJAC is available at codebase.helmholtz.cloud.