There is a widespread need among stock assessment practitioners in Australia to have a more engaged and collaborative community. Australia lacks specialist tertiary level courses, as well as national-level on-the-job training dedicated to fishery stock assessment. We also have a geographically disparate stock assessment community that largely collaborates within, rather than between, agencies and jurisdictions. In essence, there is no place to bring the stock assessment science community together to seek solidarity, help each other, build our colleague base, raise our community’s profile, identify and jointly address common issues, and accelerate assessment research and development by enhanced cooperation.
We aim to develop a formalised Community of Practice to improve connectivity, communication and efficiency, enabling the pool of experts to grow in a safe, enjoyable and informative environment. We here describe our vision to develop this Community of Practice using lessons arising from previous project activities aimed to bring the stock assessment community together. We outline our plan for an online platform comprising a communication forum and resource repository, and annual workshops uniting practitioners across Australia to address priority training needs from early to mid-career stages. The Community of Practice will ultimately create a welcoming, safe, respectful, enjoyable and collegiate space for all members, resulting in a more engaged, collaborative, and capable Australian stock assessment community. This will ultimately ensure that all jurisdictions are undertaking best practice stock assessment, comparable to leading agencies globally.