Starting in the 1990s from building databases on biodiversity, nomenclature, and species interactions, I joined TDWG community in 2012 while working as a taxonomy coordinator in FinBIF. In TDWG, I am a member of the interest groups on Data quality, and on Biodiversity curriculum and of the Invasive Organism Information Task Group. As a scientific officer in the GBIF Secretariat – live long and prosper! – I work at the interface between the GBIF infrastructure and its academic audiences, and promote biodiversity data activities in various scientific fora, and, regionally, in the FSU countries. In 2015–2016 I coordinated work of expert groups on data fitness for use in agrobiodiversity, distribution modeling, and research on alien and invasive species. Working with biodiversity informatics is very rewarding: open data reach across borders and scholarly cultures, and bring me to interesting places and enthusiastic people.