Developing Best Practices for the DDI

1
Developing Best Practices for the DDI

• Introduction Why Best Practices?
• Arofan Gregory

2
History

• In October 2007, two DDI events were run at
  Schloss Dagstuhl
• A 3-day training class/workshop on DDI 3.0
• A 5-day intensive SRG (now TIC) committee meeting
  to focus on cleaning up DDI 3.0 before its
  release
• In November 2008, two more DDI events were to be
  held at Schloss Dagstuhl
• A 5-day training class/workshop on DDI 3.0
• And something else

3
Venue of Best Practices?Workshop

• Schloss Dagstuhl, a Leibniz Center for
  Informatics is funded jointly by the German
  federal government and a number of state
  governments. The friendly and open climate at the
  conference center promotes a culture of
  communication and exchange among the workshop
  participants.

4
The Idea

• The idea of best practices came about because
• The release of DDI 3.0 had only been a few months
  earlier it was too soon to starting work on new
  features/revisions
• There was some confusion and difficulty in
  adopting or migrating to the standard
• If you took an intensive training, it was OK, but
  otherwise was difficult to approach
• The sheer size of DDI 3.0 made it very hard to
  approach
• When we suggested the idea to Mary Vardigan the
  response was enthusiastic
• The event was co-sponsored by the DDI Alliance,
  GESIS, the Minnesota Population Center, and the
  Open Data Foundation

5
What Are Best Practices?

• Best practices are not technical documentation
• They come largely from the experience and
  thinking of users of the standard, not just from
  the developers of the standard
• Standards documentation has to describe how to
  use the standard correctly
• It is not an appropriate place to tell people
  what they should do with the standard
• New users of the standard dont just ask how can
  I use this? they also ask What is the best
  way to use this?
• This is not an appropriate question for the
  standards body to answer
• Standards are not there to tell people what to do
  only how to do the things they already want to
  do
• Best practices function as a cook-book for
  implementation, making it much easier to do
  correctly

6
Was It Too Early?

• Until you have experience with implementation,
  one might argue that it is too soon to start
  developing best practices
• This is a valid point, but it was felt that
  having a framework in place to evolve as more
  people adopted the standard was desirable
• These documents are living documents which will
  change over time as we gain more practical
  implementation experience

7
What Are The Best Practices for Best Practices?

• It turns out that publishing best practices is
  very much a best practice for standards bodies!
• Other technical standards have discovered that
  interoperability and usability of their
  specifications is massively increased when best
  practices exist

8
A Closing Remark

• The invited participants (aka volunteers)
  worked incredibly hard to a schedule so
  convoluted that it would have driven us all
  insane were it not for Wendys remarkable
  spreadsheet
• There was a large volume of output
• This event was very successful, and our thanks go
  to the participants!