[DDI-users] Farewell to Europe (and EDDI) for another year

Samuel Spencer theodore.therone at gmail.com
Mon Dec 12 13:23:51 EST 2011


This email is shameless blogspam, but is also a brief wrap up of EDDI and
the Developers Meetings. Please feel free to comment via email or on the
original page at http://bit.ly/v7QKTK. You can read more of this kind of at
http:www.kidstrythisathome.com.

-----------------------

Here I sit in Helsinki Airport, awaiting a bitter sweet flight home. While
it is always good to go home and be with my family and friends, I know I am
leaving quite a few behind here in Europe and beyond.

By all accounts, the European DDI Users
Group<http://www.iza.org/conference_files/EDDI2011/call_for_papers>meetings
were a great success. Along with seeing all the work people have
done of the last year, we were able to sit and discuss and debate for
several days and have a solid plan for future work.

While I was only at the Developers meetings, we covered improvements to the
website, new ways of managing large DDI instances in relational and
non-relational databases, examined new (and forgotten) ways to design
software, debated the best ways to handle automated ID creation, listened
to the results of the semantic DDI workshops, learned about the DDI Agency
Registry <http://registry.ddialliance.org/>, debated reducing or removing
namespaces from DDI, raised the possibility of a shared DDI Blog/News
aggregator and started the creation of not one, but two major additions to
the DDI community - a new transport element nicknamed "The DDI Bucket" and
started laying the groundwork for a DDI RESTful web interface standard.

And that was in just 3 days! And I am still eagerly awaiting to see how the
"Data Without Borders" and "Longitudinal DDI" workshops went.

The week was made even more productive by the use of Google Docs to create
a single, living recollection of the event. Watching everyone type up their
notes in real time was great. Over the next few week I (and hopefully the
rest of the DDI Developers community) will continue to clean up our
collaborative notes and look forward to presenting information and
recommendations to the whole DDI community in the new year.

We also discussed upcoming meetings for the DDI Developers group and 3
possibilities were raised, at IASSIST in June, RC33 in July and EDDI next
December. While events will most likely go on at all of these events, I
strongly encourage those who can come to RC33 to be held in Sydney next
July to speak up or at the least contact me in private. There is a wealth
of talent in Australia and New Zealand who are well worth getting in
contact with and with a large enough group of DDI members in Australia I
think a "DDI Developers Down-under" would be well attended and well worth
the trip.

So with that in mind thankyou to everyone in the DDI Community for a great
week - and especially to Olof Olsson of SND for kindly offering me a place
to stay during the week. It was a fantastic week, and served to remind me
how if you work hard you can contribute to a community, being called upon
to answer questions during the meetings (and once during the question time
of someone else's talk!) was especially flattering. This has truly
re-invigorated my love of metadata (I spent the better part of my evenings
in Rome madly writing ideas for tutorials and examples I foolishly
volunteered for during the meetings)

So, with that I wish the entire DDI Community a Merry Christmas, Happy
Holidays and Happy New Year and look forward to seeing everyone again in
the new year, be it in Washington for IASSIST
2012<http://www.iassist2012.org/index.html>,
Sydney for RC33 <http://www.rc33.org/> or wonderful Bergen for EDDI 2012!!!
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