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 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, 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, Sydney for RC33 or wonderful Bergen for EDDI 2012!!!

Arrivederci

Arrivederci

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