GODAN Discussion Paper presented at IODC 2015

Things are not always like this; I usually get involved in typical tasks that have impact within a research project or a community.

However, this time things were different: With some help from the Agro-Know team (that provided me with the time needed for working on that), a great collaboration with many people in a short time (about 20 days!) and really hard work we managed to deliver a decent GODAN Discussion (ex-White) Paper that was presented yesterday at the Open Data Conference 2015.

This morning I checked out what has happened during the 1st day of the Conference, mostly browsing through tweets. This one draw my attention - the first slide of the presentation about the GODAN Discussion Paper, presented by Liz Carolan from the Open Data Institute.

.@LizCarolan presents #GODAN & @ODIHQ discussion paper: How can we improve ag, food & nutrition w #opendata #IODC15 pic.twitter.com/7B3qvesNWa

— GODAN Secretariat (@godanSec) May 28, 2015

This was more than I expected: Seeing my name in a slide presented to the participants (which btw are really important stakeholders of a global community) of an International Conference like this one was a great honor: I have presented papers and concepts myself in similar cases, but seeing my name as one of the authors of the GODAN Discussion Paper was something much more than that - priceless I would say! :-)

That's it; I am sold!

Big thanks to everyone at the lovely ODI team but mostly to Fiona Smith for the excellent management & organization of the work that needed to be delivered in such a short time & Liz Carolan for believing in me. Big thanks also to Martin Parr (CABI) for his help whenever needed and the rest of the GODAN Secretariat (Ben and Ana), as well as to everyone who responded to my requests for input to the report. I know that there are things that could have been different in the paper (I already have some points in mind) but taking into consideration the tight deadline this was what could be delivered in this short time...

I hope that this will be the first step to something even bigger, as I saw some really promising requirements coming out of the related discussions during these days :-)

P.S. The Discussion Paper is now publicly available for download through the ODI website. Feel free to download, study and comment.