NESCent facilitates synthetic research on grand challenge questions in evolutionary biology and also works to address critical needs in software infrastructure and education through promoting open, collaborative development of interoperable and standards-supporting open-source software. The Center is located in Durham, North Carolina, is jointly operated by Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University, and receives its core funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Together with developers from open-source life-science programming toolkits (BioPerl, Biojava, Biopython, Bioruby, BioSQL; collectively referred to as the Bio* projects), evolutionary software packages, and recently developers of comparative phylogenetic methods NESCent has so far run two Hackathons, which continue to have significant and lasting impacts on the landscape of collaborative software development in our field. The Center is committed to FLOSS and sharing of scientific data (see for example the NESCent Data and Software Policy at http://www.nescent.org/informatics/data_software_policy.php); all software products of the Center are released as open source and established as collaborative projects on sites such as SourceForge. Members of the Center's Informatics team are lead developers in several open-source projects, and one of our organization administrators has been active on the Board of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (http://open-bio.org/), the umbrella organization for the Bio* projects, since seven years.