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 don’t 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 Wendy’s remarkable spreadsheet There was a large volume of output This event was very successful, and our thanks go to the participants!