Merge pull request #5655 from nomadscientist/spoc_2024_end

Add end-of-year blog post for SPOC Community

news/_posts/2024-12-18-spoc.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+title: "🖖🏾Galaxy SPOC Community: Year in Review"
+contributions:
+  authorship:
+    - nomadscientist
+    - pavanvidem
+tags:
+  - gtn
+  - communications
+  - single-cell
+layout: news
+cover: "news/images/spoc_images/2024_spoc.png"
+coveralt: "A group of people standing along a staircase holding up the Vulcan salute for SPOC: 'Live long and prosper'. They look relatively happy. Taken at 2024 Galaxy Community Conference."
+---
+
+# 🚀 2024: A SPOC-tacular Year in Review 🌌  
+
+As we orbit the end of another stellar year, let’s engage warp drive and reflect on the out-of-this-world achievements of the [**Single-cell & sPatial Omics Community (SPOC 🖖))](https://galaxyproject.org/community/sig/singlecell/). From launching new tools to charting new tutorials, SPOC’s journey through the Galaxy (platform) has been nothing short of cosmic! 🌠  
+
+## 🌟 The Mission: Empowering Single-Cell Scientists  
+This year, we continued to boldly go where no omics community has gone before, propelling the SPOC ecosystem beyond single-cell RNA sequencing. With new training materials, tools, and workflows, our community has bridged the gap between transcriptomics, multiomics, and even spatial data analysis, ensuring that researchers have the tools they need to explore biological frontiers. Think of it as assembling the ultimate research starship! 🚀  
+
+## 🌌 SPOC: A Nebula of Collaboration  
+Our [Write-a-thons]({% link events/2024-10-29-spoc-write-a-thon.md %}) this year were true cosmic collisions of brilliance, bringing together contributors to polish workflows and draft tutorials. We also unified SPOC’s subdomains into one hyper-efficient portal with our friends from Australia. The community’s fusion power—collaboration—continues to drive SPOC’s development at lightspeed, with the launch of our first [SPOC Collaboration Fest]({% link news/2024/12/06/spoc_cofest.md %}) that brought Galaxy and non-Galaxy single-cell scientists together to sustain our ever-expanding galaxy of omics science. The GTN mission control kept engineering stellar widgets for the SPOC galaxy, unveiling a shiny new constellation layout for our training page and advanced asteroid-sifting tools to navigate the meteoric flow of events and news from our community!
+
+## 🌠 Tools and Tutorials: A Star Cluster of Resources  
+In 2024, SPOC added **15 new tools and 6 new training resources** to the Galaxy Training Network (GTN)—a constellation that lights the way for researchers navigating the complexities of single-cell and spatial omics. The introduction of SnapATAC2 and Squidpy tools felt like finding life-supporting planets in uncharted galaxies. These additions - and our wider commitment to sustainability and updating materials - ensure our workflows are as sharp as a lightsaber. ✨🛠️  
+
+## 🚀 Research Data Management: Guiding Stars for FAIR Practices  
+Following the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles, SPOC emphasized **sustainability** by implementing best practices in data archiving and tool maintenance. We co-led a BioHackathon Europe project with our fellow Microbiome commanders aimed at effectively labelling our tools and building the single-cell toolshed category. From tutorials on history-sharing to archiving for training data preservation, we’re keeping our resources as eternal as starlight. 🌟  
+
+## 🌍 SPOC’s Global Universe  
+With SPOC’s unified platform, global events, rolling timezones, and sustainability prioritisation of user testing across servers, we’ve brought researchers from every corner of the planet into our orbit. Whether you’re beaming in from Europe, the Americas, or the Andromeda Galaxy (or maybe Australia), SPOC’s resources remain accessible, scalable, and universal.  
+
+## 🌌 Looking to the Horizon  
+As SPOC’s starship accelerates toward 2025, we’ll continue to explore new omics territories and deepen our cosmic connections across the Galaxy. Thank you to every SPOC cadet, captain, and commander who contributed this year—you’ve made SPOC the brightest star in the bioinformatics universe!  
+
+Keep reaching for the stars, SPOC-nauts! 🪐✨
+
+![Chart showing: 7 new workflows, 2 new FAQs, 3 News items, 2 new Slide decks, 4 events, 4 new tutorials, 5 recordings, and 1 new learning pathway]({% link news/images/spoc_images/community_resources_2024.png %} "SPOC 2024: By the numbers")