Humanity will remember 2020 for lots of reasons. Maybe one of them will be that it was the year that conferences and meetings around the globe went online. Maybe this trend won’t last, but for many, the challenge of bringing together communities to try and replicate the in person meeting experience with a virtual one, could not be missed. DataCite stepped up to the challenge by bringing our annual member meeting to the virtual realm in 3 different time zones; EMEA, APAC and AMER. Here’s a summary.
Matt Buys, DataCite’s Executive Director opened each meeting with a presentation reflecting on DataCite’s strategic priorities, Vision 2020, and the DataCite community of practice. You can watch his full presentation here. Sarala Wimalaratne, DataCite’s Product Engineering Director, then led a session focused on the DataCite product roadmap. The participants were asked polling questions that will provide input for our priority setting in the coming year. The polling results are shown below, it’s interesting to see that the participants in each region agreed on most things, but not everything.
- What is the main reason for registering DOIs in your organisation?
- Following the feedback from last year’s member meeting, we have spent time improving the stability of our services. How satisfied are you with the stability of our services this year?
- Last year you requested us to put more energy into member driven activities. How satisfied are you with our progress on this?
- Which of the priorities in the DataCite 2020 Vision is most important to you?
- What is your preferred way of influencing the DataCite Product Roadmap?
- Are you using a Service Provider (an organization that has integrated with one of the DataCite APIs in order to allow existing DataCite Members to register DOIs using that Member’s own log-in credentials. A CRIS or a repository platform are both examples of a Service Provider) for DOI registration?
- Which service do you spend most of your time interacting with?
- Which service would you like us to spend more time on improving?
Next up were 3 short talks from members in each region, who shared their DataCite use cases and experiences under the broad themes of technology, metadata and membership. Their presentations were a highlight of all of the meetings. You can view the slides and recordings by clicking the links below:
EMEA Member talks – view the recording here
- Building a DataCite consortium – Irina Sens, TIB, Germany
- download presentation here.
- Metadata licensing – Nick Sheppard, University of Leeds, UK
- download presentation here.
- Implementing CKAN with DataCite DOIs – Bosun Obileye, IITA, Nigeria
- download presentation here.
APAC Member talks – view the recording here
- Building a DataCite consortium- Andrea Goethals, DOINZ, New Zealand
- download presentation here.
- Connecting PIDsEstelle Cheng, ORCID, Taiwan
- download presentation here.
- Metadata quality RCT – Scott Edmunds, GigaScience/BGI/China National Gene Bank, China
- download presentation here.
AMER Member talks – view the recording here
- Automating DOI minting with python – Tom Morrell, Caltech, US
- download presentation here.
- Building a DataCite consortium / CONECTI – Harrysson Nobrega, CNPQ, Brazil
- download presentation here.
- The new version of the DataCite metadata schema – Anne Raugh, University of Maryland, US
- download presentation here.
A facilitated break-out session followed. Participants were divided into separate rooms and had the chance to ask questions to the speakers from the previous session and engage in a broader discussion with the other DataCite members in the room. The outcomes of these sessions have provided some clear indications about what matters to our members (metadata was a hot topic) and will guide future discussions and focus groups.
Although not yet providing the same level of engagement, excitement, or quality biscuits as an in person meeting, this year’s member meetings were productive and provided really important feedback. They were also all carbon neutral. That in itself should be enough to encourage us to keep working hard to make online meetings work as well as physical meetings. I would like to thank the program committee Paloma Arraiza, Nick Wolf and Helena Cousijn for sharing their great ideas and helping to make this happen, the speakers and attendees and of course all of the DataCite team, who are always willing to help out, get up early and stay up late.
