Marketing and Partnerships Group Meeting Minutes
November 17, 2015
Present: Steve McEachern, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
AAPOR 2016
Barry talked to one of the organizers about a space and time. The issue is that the conference is held in a hotel and there is a contract for specific rooms and times. The conference chair will need to weigh in on this. Barry made it clear that we don’t want to conflict with other events. Tuesday and Wednesday are WAPOR (AAPOR begins on Thursday) and maybe sliding our meeting between them might work. This would be best in the evening. Several people have submitted abstracts for the program.
We should probably invite ISR, SRO (they created a Blaise export to DDI), Gallup, Pew, and NORC to the meeting. Dan Gillman can also help with statistical agencies. We should also reach out to CASES and Blaise.
We have had conversations with DevInfo and it looks like in Germany the city statisticians will meet next year in September. Wendy could give a presentation on DDI.
We should convene a telecon with Dan, Steve, Barry, Jon, Louise, and George to brainstorm about the participant list for the meeting in December. We should give assignments.
Barry will give a big push for NADDI when at EDDI in Copenhagen. DDI needs to make marketing a priority as it is central to the future.
Steve has a meeting with Australia.gov. They use CKAN and he thinks we can make an argument about variable-level metadata.
We can talk to Jon and Louise to modify the Call to Action in advance of this meeting.
ISI
We may want to look at the next meeting of this conference, which will be in August of 2017 in Marrakesh. We could put together booths for DDI, SDMX, and GSIM. While this is not currently on our list, we should add it. We have enough time to find out how much this will cost.
Marketing Team Meeting
September 15, 2015
Present: Chuck Humphrey, Jared Lyle, Steve McEachern, Ron Nakao, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
AAPOR 2016
Barry made contact with the AAPOR organizers to find out how big the conference is, what the procedure is for submitting a workshop (competitive, organized around the theme of the conference), the booth ($1500), etc. Collective has had booths at AAPOR in the past so we can speak with them about it. The DDI-driven conference evaluation was also raised and this seemed to be received positively. This seems like our "in". Barry will send an email with a proposal to do the conference eval. It might be worth getting previous surveys to see the topic coverage and understand the instrument ahead of time. It's possible to do longitudinal comparisons quickly. "Membership survey driven by DDI" may give us an in for the following year. At IASSIST and NADDI we did a real-time demo, and it would be great to try that again.
This gives a tangible concrete example of the advantages of DDI. It's more effective than handing out pens as they see the value in the tool. At some point in the future we might integrate the survey into apps on the phone for conference schedules. Can we have people do a bit and submit as they go along? Maybe real-time responses are the way to go.
It's not clear if they are going both an eval and a membership survey this year, so we need to figure that out. The IT group at WI are also interested in this. We can build a good strategy related to how we implement the survey.
We should also try to get on the program with Jon and Louise. We can also try to share a booth to cut costs.
For IAOS (International Association of Official Statistics) and the interrelationship of DDI with GSIM may also be of interest.
This can be a use case for our model building and interoperability. Interoperability with other vendors in this case is useful. Jon and Louise have a great slide about how metadata passes across several different agencies. We will be showing a live example of how we can do this – pass information between them. We are a front person for the DDI not a company. We should emphasize "document, discover, interoperate" and talk to potential partners about our advantages.
The next step is for Barry to formulate an email with a rough outline of what we are proposing for the DDI-driven eval. Colectica and Nooro are on board with doing this. It will be pro-bono this first year but we could request a fee going forward.
We should create a document that we all comment on and hammer it into a marketing plan for AAPOR.
Looking at this use case for developers, the biggest thing is that looking at questionnaires we can separate out the pieces (response domains, etc.) and this is free to be passed on. 90% of the metadata for a dataset is present in the fielding of a questionnaire.
How receptive is the AAPOR community to the DDI approach and sharing data through repositories? There are big players like Roper but there are also proprietary stakeholders. This may be an opportunity to introduce the concept of data sharing to the AAPOR community.
The statement of shared principles around questionnaire design is also relevant. Steve will be meeting with Jon and Louise before Dagstuhl and they will do some planning to put together the short course. Barry will try to find out the deadline for short courses, which are intended to be related to the conference theme. Reshaping the Data Landscape is the theme of the conference.
The reuse of questions between surveys is very useful to researchers. Harmonization is another strength.
We are thinking of a three-pronged strategy: a booth (possibly with partners), the conference eval, and a short course or panel session.
There is enough there to really sell DDI now, so we need to come up with a more nuanced way of sharing information on DDI.
We should try to meet again in two weeks.
We should commit to a booth and maybe at some point share the cost with Colectica. The booth comes with a conference registration. We will need to have content at the booth – a video, exhibit, etc.
We were considering putting together a survey for the membership so we should talk about this at a future meeting. Which meetings to others attend?
Present: Chuck Humphrey, Jared Lyle, Steve McEachern, Ron Nakao, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
Marketing Targets for 2015-2016
Guiding principle for plan: target groups associated with specific stages of the data lifecycle; this plan reaches data producers and preservationists.
AAPOR May 12-15, 2016, Austin, Texas
Target Audience: survey organizations, data producers, researchers, large studies
Give-away Products: pens, thumb drives (get better quality this time); flyers for upcoming conferences like NADDI and EDDI
Presentation; poster; offer to conduct conference evaluation; booth?; workshop before/after AAPOR?; Focus a presentation on how DDI fits into the data lifecycle, question/variable banks, transparency initiative, driving the data capture, DDI profiles, accessibility, big longitudinal studies
Metrics of Success:
1 new DDI Alliance member;
150 new email contacts (collect business cards; request of information; online sign-up for emails through Google form or paper form as a fall-back to receive newsletter; aim for quarter of the full attendance)
Report of intangibles relating to success with a qualitative flavor
Build loyalty when back from the meeting by introducing new people to the larger group; Twitter discussion (and other social media like Linked-In)
Recruitment of five individuals to one of our working groups
Investigate who will be there and build quality contacts
DDI representative(s): Barry Radler, Jon Johnson, Jeremy and Dan?, Steve?; who might present?
Budget: $2500?
Actions:
Get tchotzkes, explore costs of booth, explore conference workshops before and after AAPOR, start social media for DDI
iPRES 2105, November 2-6, 2015, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Target Audience: data repository developers, data curators, digital preservation officers; repository managers, people implementing technologies
Give-away Products: thumb drives and pens
Presentation: poster; offer to conduct conference evaluation; How DDI fits into the preservation environment; interoperability with other standards; map study description to Dublin Core (crosswalk); capture represented/conceptual variables; what can be harvested from DDI; many don’t think beyond study level so we have a message to share about variable level; classifications in geography and time
Metrics of Success: 1 new DDI Alliance member; 150 new email contacts
DDI representative(s): Someone from Odum or Duke or the ICPSR; Jon Crabtree and Nancy McGovern are organizers
Budget: ?
Actions: We have missed the deadlines for presentations/posters so contact our colleagues to see who is attending; anticipate deadlines and reach out to members about who is going; try to target a member survey to get the ball rolling (and document in DDI!); contact organizers to see how DDI can have a presence
Partnership Targets for 2015-2016
Guiding principle for plan: establish DDI as a standards setting organization and stakeholder in the RDA community
Research Data Alliance P7, 28 Feb - 3 March, 2016, Tokyo, Japan
Target Partners: Other standards setting organizations in research data management and the Active Data Management Plan Interest Group
Give-away Products: thumb drives and pens
Presentation: poster; offer to conduct conference evaluation
Metrics of Success: 1 new partnership activity; 150 new email contacts
DDI representative(s): Ron Nakao
Budget: ?
Other
The Abu Dabi conference will be held after EDDI -- the IAOS -- and we would need to propose things quickly. This would be targeted to the NSO community.
Present: Chuck Humphrey, Ron Nakao, Barry Radler, Mary Vardigan
Promotional Materials
Reading materials are not as useful as practical things that one can actually use. We should think about pens and thumb drives.
Conferences to Attend
We should look at the stakeholders we are trying to reach. AAPOR might be a good meeting to attend. Barry may attend and would like to have technical people along with him. We may be able to make new contact with Roper in its new home. Stakeholders there are the traditional ones, survey organizations, data producers, researchers, large studies.
The RDA plenary (in the states in 2016) is a place to ensure that DDI is part of the solutions that are being formed or shaped by the research community, rather than a place to get new members. There are partnerships there. The DDI voice should be present. Active data management plans is a focus. DDI should be one of the contributing solutions to provide metadata for DMPs.
Our group should map out a strategy to engage with RDA. We should document this -- all the ways we are engaging in RDA. We should promote this.
What can the marketing group do to empower involvement at each of these meetings? Should there be a common toolkit?
The active data management plan model isn’t being built for exchange or reuse. The second generation will be driven by a metadata model.
At RDA we would want to be part of working groups and/or birds of a feather groups. For the Tokyo meeting in Spring 2016, we should have a poster about DDI interoperating with various standards and then give out things related to DDI.
We might also approach a preservation community. This could be iPRES (November 2-6 in Chapel Hill and October 2016 in Berne, Switzerland) or RDAP. We need to be seen as part of the curator’s solution for research data preservation. We know a lot of people in the Chapel Hill area.
This plan gives us data producers and then preservationists, both parts of the lifecycle. We should do an evaluation to assess our impact. How many contacts did we make, etc.? We should itemize each of the metrics for these efforts. We might have a form on which we write down an email address and areas of interest to follow up on afterwards.
We shouldn’t lose sight of the conference evals, which are another good way to sell the standard.
T-shirts are another good advertisement. A golf shirt would be even better.
Present: Kelly Chatain, Steve McEachern, Ron Nakao, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
A running list of potential members that I can contact:
UNC
Roper (when they announce a new home)
Stats Denmark -- other NSOs?
EUDAT
Wisconsin
DataFirst
IMF
WHO
Census (RDCs?)
Canadian RDCs
Statistics Canada
Wendy is doing a workshop before ISI and could use a brochure. This is for people involved in IPUMS International. We could broach this topic there. The developing countries may not have the budgets for membership but might join as Associates.
A strategic note to the membership about this would be a good idea.
We should also check the places where DDI is being used to see if they are members.
How to incorporate “Document, Discover, Interoperate”
How can we incorporate this more fully? SPSS is an example of a company whose legal name has changed. Colectica is another good example. Marketing and branding can differ from the formal name.
We keep DDI because that is our brand. The slogan can be Document, Discover, Interoperate. This can go at the top of the page on the new site.
Where to start on Marketing Plan:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vwMNb9uoPe8dRwsNbbc3KoOZFKnv_lQLlPIVGHcsldQ/edit
Before we go to conferences, we want a strong website presence and want to have marketing trinkets to provide.
The logo has tentative approval but there has been no official authorization. This group is empowered to come up with proposals for the membership and the EB to decide on. We don’t want any unnecessary problems. We can send out the website with the new logo and ask the membership for feedback, specifically mentioning the logo. Gears communicate a lot in ways that are less abstract. Does the logo conceptually say something about DDI and is it functionally easy to use on different kinds of materials? We need to test for grayscale implementation, for example.
ISI is in Rio in July and Wendy will attend. She will also attend a DataONE meeting. These are good venues to showcase DDI.
We need a set of things that anyone can pass out or make available. One of the most effective is a T-shirt -- this is a living advertisement. Polo shirts are another possibility. Bigger buttons would also work. Static cling stickers for laptops are good. These are good for advertising and a reward for people as well. We can ship things to the venue. We can add the URL to these marketing materials.
By fall we will have a collection of these materials and a good website to show. For the July ESRA conference we will try to have buttons and stickers to give out.
We should try to get a sense of who will be attending which conferences with a mechanism to determine attendance. A Doodle poll might work for this. We should put this into the newsletter as well: if you are attending Conference x, let us know and we will send you things to distribute. We want to sell the membership on this idea: this is our package of DDI gear and here is the website and brochure. A Google doc for people to sign up on for conferences would work.
Do we need a members-only part of the site? This could be a phase 2 thing for the site.
Chuck mentioned at the meeting that DDI is 20 years old this year and we should take advantage of this. This gives us some credibility since we have been around for 20 years. We should play this up. A sticker to paste on stock brochures saying DDI--20 Years would work.
Present: Kelly Chatain, Steve McEachern, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
Review of Marketing Plan
The group discussed the question about getting more paying members versus increasing DDI usage. As a standards body, we do a lot to promote adoption. This is an identity issue as we look forward. If we can fund the more intensive marketing for two years, we can then assess how we are doing in terms of outcomes. We need metrics to judge the effects of the marketing activities. Use and tool development are more difficult to measure than membership. There are other ways to contribute in terms of meeting organization, time, etc.
The key question is how much these marketing things cost and how do we spend our limited resources. In the short term marketing is a priority.
The more people using the standard, the more it will improve and this can be driven by marketing. But there are big problems getting people to feed back about their problems.
We need to set up our expectations for the future. How do we convert the usage into membership?
What is our marketing angle for DDI membership? What do they get in return for their membership. They get a vote on the standard and that assumes that their institution is invested.
We need a paradigm shift to get people using it and support the development of the standard.
By using DDI for conference evaluations, we can be obtaining information about our market and at the same time show them its use. AAPOR might be a possibility -- cradle to grave idea. We could also push this for RDA. Right now the evaluation uses DDI fragments, but we could set it up using the full publication version also.
Brainstorming on Name for DDI4
The TC discussed this as they want to get away from version numbers and there has been a lukewarm reaction to the Lifecycle MD name. Model-driven doesn’t really get at the content of the new version.
The new focus is on functionality rather than lifecycle -- what tasks do you want to perform?
We could just call it DDI and make sure to explain what DDI is and what the vision is. The new version is more of a unified set, but that isn’t a good name for it. Codebook and Lifecycle are not going away and can be extracted from the new version. Another idea is DDI-Views, but views are not the whole package. The different flavors can be seen as confusing the brand.
The word “metadata” can put people off and for some audiences we shouldn’t use it. The lay audience doesn’t care about Codebook or Lifecyle terminology.
DDI could be seen as Data Discovery and Interoperability as this has more meaning than Data Documentation Initiative.
Present: Kelly Chatain, Steve McEachern, Ron Nakao, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
Feedback from Executive Board
The group looked at the EB’s minutes related to the marketing group’s request for prioritization. It was pointed out that DataONE is not really a standards-setting organization in the same sense as others. They do advocate for best practices and standards, however.
Academic libraries are a challenge to engage with as they are building their own institutional repositories and don’t necessarily think they need a domain-specific metadata standard like DDI as they are more focused on data discovery at the Dublin Core level.
Society of American Archivists might be a possibility for some collaboration. There is an overlap across research data management and records management and archives. Kelly and a colleague are going to try to get a Data Curation roundtable group going in SAA, and there could be some possibilities.
The Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) at Michigan is transitioning to new technology and a new website and this could be an opportunity to collaborate.
Organizations missing from the targets list are broad repositories that archive cross-disciplinary data and are expanding in scope to include social science. How might DDI interact with their systems? These include health research data, environmental data, etc. We need to interact with their search systems. More and more researchers want to do cross-disciplinary research.
This group won’t be able to do everything, so we need to pick one or two to go after that will be most strategic. We should also go after low-hanging fruit.
We need some outreach brochures, which is a cost that we should add to our total marketing costs. Given time, we can focus them better.
There will be a meeting at NADDI to talk about costs for marketing. We should identify a time that most can meet.
Website and Logo
The logo will be shown in color at the next meeting. At NADDI we may be showing the logo and rough design but won’t have the site ready for usability testing. The logo and a functioning site should be ready for IASSIST, though. We can have people test-drive there.
Logos:
The group started with a review of the first draft of logos.
Ron noted probably we have some suggestions for design criteria.
- Colour if used need to contribute to the design, and should also consider the greyscale version
- Icon needs to be representative if it is used
- Options 7-9 were too big
- There was concern that most geographic content should be avoided.
Comparisons were made with some other international logos.
- Suggestion was made for something with gears might work.
- An example was:
- http://www.canstockphoto.com/magnifying-optical-glass-with-gears-icon-15040076.html
- Perhaps in combination with the letters on option 1 (of either the first or second round) might be effective.
Website:
Kelly gave a short preface of the current progress on the redesign. Much of the work appears to be reorganisation rather than new material. In terms of new content, the only obvious new content was training materials, and some event promotion (e.g. Dagstuhl). The key issue appears to be the gateway homepage, as a means for getting into the site. We also need to consider how this design integrates with the collaborative sites (Jira, Confluence, etc.)
Kelly’s question was – is there anything missing that you would like to see there?
Suggestions from Arofan
- Specification and RDF vocabs need to be integrated (the RDF is a spec).
- The buttons in the dev version remind too much of the Windows 8 interface (the horror!!).
Wendy suggested some UI user experience testing (possibly at IASSIST)
What would we like to see?
- Barry suggested removing the lifecycle image (as did Wendy)
- Perhaps replace with a map of locations where DDI is in use.
- Ron suggested the DDI news becomes prominent.
- Possibly a community activities section on the main page – would also link in to more active engagement with the user community
- Perhaps a “what’s popular”? section (What are people looking at?). Note that this is dependent on who is the most active users of the site – may skew the results. Helps to expose some of the content that we internally would not have thought of
- Possibly an FAQ (relates to “Getting Started” content)
- Arofan suggested one approach – “When I go a new standards site, I want within 4-5 clicks to find out what this standard is about”. Also relates to the “Getting Started”
- Option for feedback – questions, comments, etc.
Suggestion from the group was to run first iteration as a focus group style approach – a small audience to enable initial review of the basic entries into the site, to discuss the user experience of these entries.
Barry noted the development of a new DDI – the Data Discovery Index (www.biocaddie.org). George Alter is involved in this.
Meeting was closed at 7am Canberra time, with agenda for the next time to be developed.
--SECOND SET OF MEETING MINUTES (DRAFT??)--
These are suggestions from the DDI Marketing Group conference call. They pointed out a few things that we have already figured out, so I left them off of this list. I wanted to note suggestions that are in addition to what we already know.
Logos:
Some suggestions for design criteria:
- Use colour only if it contributes to the design. Consider needs of greyscale version as well.
- There was concern that most geographic(globes) content should be avoided.
Comparisons were made with some other international logos.
- Suggestion was made for something with gears might work. (Gears signify the interoperability and actionable features of DDI, what makes it unique as a standard).
- An example was: http://www.canstockphoto.com/magnifying-optical-glass-with-gears-icon-15040076.html
- Perhaps in combination with the letters on option 1 (of either the first or second round) might be effective.
Website:
The key issue appears to be the gateway homepage, as a means for getting into the site.
Homepage suggestions
- The four buttons in the dev version remind too much of the Windows 8 interface (this was a common consensus). General confusion about what the four buttons mean)
- Remove the lifecycle image
- Perhaps replace with a map of locations where DDI is in use.
- What’s New becomes DDI news (we did talk about this)
- Community section where specs are, would look good next to the map. (We did talk about this)
- Perhaps a “what’s popular”? widget (What are people looking at?). Note that this is dependent on who is the most active users of the site – may skew the results. Helps to expose some of the content that we internally would not have thought of
- Possibly an FAQ (relates to “Getting Started” content)
- Arofan suggested one approach – “When I go to a new standards site, within 4-5 clicks I want to find out what this standard is about”. Also relates to the “Getting Started”
- Option for submitting feedback – questions, comments, etc.
User Research:
Suggestion from the group was to run first iteration as a focus group style approach – a small audience to enable initial review of the basic entries into the site, to discuss the user experience of these entries. This could be done at NADDI (?) Barry needs to fill some space.
Wendy suggested some UI user experience testing (possibly at IASSIST). For instance, we could set up a station at the registration desk. Take fifteen minutes and run people through a few simple tasks. Or could we set something up in the poster session?
Present: Arofan Gregory, Chuck Humphrey, Steve McEachern, Ron Nakao, Barry Radler, Mary Vardigan
The group talked about priorities for marketing DDI and the Executive Board’s request that we put costs around those priorities.
Website
The group saw the DDI website as the keystone of any marketing efforts. The groups focusing on the Website, Marketing, and Training all have overlap in their missions and should work together with the website as the central hub for DDI material and the DDI brand.
Coordinating the three groups falls to the Director, but the Marketing group can take responsibility for oversight of the website content as well as generating some new content.
In terms of existing content for the site, Eurostat has created documents and videos around DDI use cases, and we may be able to use some of these, although they were created for NSIs in Europe.
Action: Arofan will put Mary in touch with Marco Pellegrino about this.
Outreach and Partnerships
The Marketing Group previously identified several stakeholder groups to reach out to. Should outreach follow after the website has been revamped, or should it happen in parallel? Although the Marketing team probably cannot do both the website and outreach at once, we can engage the Executive Board in partnerships and ask them to identify which outreach targets have strategic priority. They can then define which groups to target and how to reach them.
Action: Mary will provide the Executive Board a summary of the marketing targets for the next meeting.
In terms of costs, the outreach will generally consist of attendance at meetings so travel would be the main cost. We may also want to have some marketing materials (booth, handouts, etc.) branded with the DDI identity.
Videos for the website can be expensive if we use a professional firm, but we may be able to produce lower-end videos for much less.
Objectives of Outreach
A question was raised about what we hoped to accomplish by reaching out to strategic partners. In general, the objectives are:
Get new DDI members
Increase use and adoption of DDI (Get new DDI users)
Get new people involved in DDI stewardship (While this is a separate goal, this group will be likely be comprised of current/new DDI members and DDI users)
Work with other research standards bodies to integrate and exchange information between DDI and other standards
(Chuck Humphrey - comment
It seemed to me the discussion we had about Web services and APIs was associated with an objective to strengthen DDI's position with other research standards.)
Strategic partnerships can also strengthen the DDI specification and effort. For example, in the area of research administration, we could partner with CASRAI around common elements to reinforce the use of both standards.
Partnership brokering is critical.
DDI Brand
The Marketing group should also be involved in developing a DDI brand and style with a template that is easily identifiable as the DDI Alliance.
Web Services and APIs
We might want to focus on providing web services and generating APIs to registries. Artefactual has a format policy registry that we could interoperate with through an API. In general, this direction makes our standard more approachable.
The HLG has been discussing a simplified API to interface with CSPA services. It involves reducing all of the read and write commands to seven API calls to pass a dataset between services. This may also be something to pursue. Developers don’t have to learn DDI but learn the API instead. HLG is our user base, which increases the potential impact.
APIs should be open to anyone to use. We need a policy for how we relate to vendors to be fair -- we don’t want to privilege one vendor over another.
We could put out a DDI web service that could be used by a range of applications (as Amazon did when it created a simple web service for listing things to sell on Amazon). Creating interoperability is crucial. This way DDI can respond to beacons (calls for our information).
ANDS in Australia has taken the lead in enabling registries and people to work together. DDI might look at getting involved in more registry efforts.
In working with other standards like CASRAI or CDISC, another approach is to find standard points of linkage and common ground. Crosswalks can be helpful and we can consider including other standards’ data dictionaries (or links into them) in our model.
Special Interest Groups
The DDI Developers can be seen as a special interest group organized around the DDI standard, and there could be another such SIG for national statistical organizations.
In the corporate world, marketing firms would go after these niche groups and nurture them. We should try to do more of that in the DDI world. We can help to coordinate them and have a space for them on the DDI site.
Next Steps
At NADDI the Marketing group members in attendance can get together in a side meeting around a whiteboard to continue the discussion of priority activities and costs for them.
Also, we can have a plenary session on marketing ideas along with an open discussion about opportunities for the Alliance, special interest groups, and development priorities.
Present: Arofan Gregory, Chuck Humphrey, Steve McEachern, Barry Radler, Wendy Thomas, Mary Vardigan
This group met for the first time in response to an action item from the June meeting in Toronto. The mandate of the committee is to explore strategic partnerships for DDI and develop a marketing approach to “sell” DDI to new communities and users.
Marketing Targets and Partnerships
The group started by listing possible marketing targets:
National statistical agencies
Government agencies
Individual researchers
Academic libraries
Health sciences
Data collectors/firms/Survey research organizations
Technologists/Software developers/Vendors (movement towards R and Stata-- define metadata that would work with R package?)
Directors/administrators
Archives
Large research projects (MIDUS, HRS, PSID, ELSA, IPUMS, WLS, VETSA, National Children’s Study, etc.)
They also began a list of strategic partnerships:
(Chuck Humphrey - commentsI think it would help separating standards setting organizations (SSO) and standards developing organizations (SDO) from user communities in this list.
In what way would alliances be strategic? A. With other SSO's, we could coordinate overlapping descriptive areas and trumpet complementary uses that result in greater coverage together than alone. B. With other SSO's we could look at resource sharing to reduce costs.
Thought I should differentiate an SDO from and SSO: "SDOs are differentiated from standards setting organizations (SSOs) in that SDOs may be accredited to develop standards using open and transparent processes." Wikipedia)
Standards-developing organizations
Dublin Core
ISO
Standards-setting organizations (community-based)
SDMX (in place)
DataCite
EML (Ecological Metadata Language)
CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium)
UN (in place)
CASRAI (research administration metadata)
User communities
Funding agencies
Research Data Alliance (RDA)
DUVA (companies that do support work for city statistical offices in Germany; software)
DataONE
How might we set up strategic alliances? We have a lot in common with SSOs. How might we share resources?
Mission Statement
It was also pointed out that we should revisit the mission statement, which was revised in the context of the model-based specification in 2012 at Dagstuhl. This will provide a key organizing principle and marketing message.
From Dagstuhl 2012 (with some edits):
The Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) is an international standard for describing data related to the observation and measurement of human activity. With origins in the quantitative social sciences, DDI is capable of being used by researchers in other disciplines, and can document other types of data, such as social media, biomarkers, administrative data, and transaction data. DDI is a model-based metadata specification that can be implemented in a variety of technologies and its principal strength is making research metadata machine-actionable. The specification itself is modular and is designed to document and manage different stages of data lifecycles, such as conceptualization, collection, processing, analysis, distribution, discovery, repurposing, and archiving.
(Ron Nakao - comment
qualitative?)
Add the phrase about “independently understandable.”
We also need to develop an “elevator” pitch to describe DDI to prospective “clients. “ There can be a “high entry barrier” for some audiences; we need to make sure that one of those barriers is not the inability to describe DDI’s strengths in 25 words or less. A well-worded and formatted Web page should be developed with the objective of selling DDI in this way.
(Chuck Humphrey - comments
DDI makes your data independently understandable for other researchers as well as for machine processing and analytic systems. )
(Barry Radler - comments
Another Goal: Attend, sponsor, and present at conferences (not just IASSIST); having the promotional materials ready, clear. And avoiding talk about internal technical processes like the Moving Forward Project. "What's it gonna take for me to get you in this car today?" )
General Discussion
Also important are “carrots” and “sticks” that we can offer to encourage people to adopt DDI. Discoverability is an important carrot.
The Wellcome Trust has recently published a report that highlights DDI and there will now be a follow-on project that will focus on metadata for the health sciences. This community has prioritized data management very highly.
We need to define the high-value target audiences for our marketing efforts. Researchers are the most difficult to reach but potentially a very big win. We need to “own our own niche”. We have expanded our niche from archives to data producers and official statistics agencies. Now the health sciences appear to be another possible target. Libraries are another target as they begin to manage data along with more traditional resources.
Crafting the Message
What can you do with DDI?
Discover data through DDI
Document my data
Preserve my data
Share my data
Interoperate with other data and other systems
(Chuck Humphrey - comments
We took a similar approach with our RDMS website providing researchers with four specific entry points. http://library.ualberta.ca/researchdata/ )
Need to convince people about DDI and then show them how to get started, which is another place that the website needs improvement.
Add simple branch for researchers, for librarians, for developers, etc.
Distinction between buttons and beacons. To check compliance with DDI, you would use an API through a beacon to test the file against the standard.
Services to the Web
What registry roles can we play? DDI agency registry -- make this widely known. We could be strategic -- ORCID, CASRAI, and DDI, for example. Registries have value in machine to machine interactions. Arefactual’s format policy registry -- define for a data file extension attributes for that format. When creating an AIP, you can query is this a preservation format? What do I need to formalize it to? We could be a registry node for a format policy registry. Translating formats from one to another would be another possibility.
Next Meeting
We need to start profiling the different marketing targets. We need to integrate Web presence and partners that fit with those activities.
Taxonomies and classifications bring potential to work with international partners.