Introduction: from small to big

Amidst the grand initiatives and prospects of quickly gathering the “low-hanging fruit” represented by the big players and data providers, the needs of individual and small group contributors of biodiversity information have been neglected. Ignoring these small contributors, who often represent taxon specialists, producers of agricultural datasets, or compilers of geographically-based faunal inventories, misses rich content that could be used for a variety of high quality analyses, e.g., contributing towards informed decisions for sustainable use of our biotic resources. This neglect poses a great challenge for the global biodiversity informatics community to find a way to balance the needs of the smaller contributors whose immediate goals are more focused on the specimens on their bench than sharing their findings over the internet. This session will address issues of content mobilisation; attempts to meet infrastructural and technical challenges to contributing and sharing biodiversity information; and facing the realities of biodiversity informatics in the developing and mega-biodiversity world.;