🌟 Summary of the Community Meeting on June 16, 2026

In this meeting, we talked about how eLabFTW supports open science and interoperability via the .eln file format. Specifically, we discussed two projects closely related to eLabFTW:

• The ELN Consortium - This is a group of ELN editors and vendors who work to support interoperability between ELNs via the .eln file format. We talked about the goals of the consortium and how to get involved. The ELN Consortium was created by Nico Carpi and Dr. Stefan Brinkman to develop a standardized file format based on the ROCrate specification using JSON-LD and Zip archives. To learn more about the ELN Consortium, visit the website https://the.elnconsortium.org/ and the GitHub page https://github.com/theelnconsortium

• The eln.community template sharing website https://eln.community/ - This is a new website that is now available for public testing by users of eLabFTW and other ELNs that are part of the ELN Consortium! The site allows users to share and browse templates according to categories, organizations. Experiment and resource templates can be uploaded and downloaded as .eln files. The template sharing hub will eventually be linked from directly inside eLabFTW. You can access the site using your ORCID. If you don’t have an ORCID, register here https://orcid.org/register. In this meeting we did a demo of the site, which is expected to be officially open for use in September. Please try it out over the summer and let us know what you think!

After the presentation we discussed ongoing development priorities including fixing import/export bugs, implementing trust levels for imported data, and preparing version 5.6, which will have improved user interface features like infinite scroll and customizable table columns.

Thanks so much to everyone who attended. See you at the next community meeting in early Autumn!

• elabftw
• community meeting