Our yearly community meeting, the INCF Assembly, is a unique venue where neuroscience researchers, tool developers, standards developers and infrastructure providers can meet with potential collaborators and hear about the latest advancements in neuroinformatics and FAIR neuroscience. 
This year, the Assembly will be hosted on the Gather platform.

Terminology is often a barrier to enter a new field. The open scholarship movement in particular has generated many new terms and acronyms. Now there is a community-sourced glossary for open scholarship terms, developed with the aim to facilitate education and improve communication between experts and newcomers. The first version, v1.0, lists 250 terms and was recently described in a Comment in Nature Human Behaviour. 

On January 25, the INCF Standards and Best Practices committee endorsed the MBF neuromorphological file format v 4.0, as a standard. It is commonly known as “Neurolucida XML” and is used for digital reconstruction & modeling structure for microscopic anatomies.

The goal of the MatNWB Working Group is to support the re-use of neurophysiology data via NWB by collecting MATLAB user requirements, outreaching to the wider MATLAB user community, coordinating among development teams (MatNWB, core NWB, MathWorks), identifying community project and collaboration opportunities, and other activities as may be determined.

Developing standards requires both community coordination and consensus. Standards must also have governance structures to ensure sustainability, in addition to continued development  to stay relevant and useful. Successful standards development and adoption requires collaborative channels for the community to identify common problems and find potential solutions - the INCF Assembly is intended to build productive communities around neuroscience standards.

The Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) was established in 2017, as a national network of Canadian neuroscience research centers committed to collaborating on a series of new open neuroscience initiatives, centered on sharing data and tools. CONP is a collaborator of INCF and has funding from Brain Canada and many other partner organizations.