“The focus of this forum is software-oriented aspects of scientific imaging, particularly (but not limited to) image analysis, processing, acquisition, storage, and management of digital scientific images. The primary objective is to foster independent learning for researchers everywhere while maximally leveraging experts’ time by making their guidance available to everyone. … This new forum’s ultimate goals are to accelerate research, educate scientists in image analysis, encourage open science and reproducible research, and catalyze the creation and improvement of open-source tools and their interoperability. The improved cross-visibility of software packages will also promote their continued survival and development by attracting new users and even collaborations with other developers. In this way, together as an imaging community, we will promote new skill acquisition and subsequent dissemination of validated image analysis tools and tips.” from https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000340