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Membership of TDWG
As I said in a presentation in Bratislava, TDWG must build its membership if it is to be taken seriously in biodiversity informatics. Membership is very small considering that we currently have about 15 groups, so expertise is spread very thinly indeed. The feedback I’ve received over the past two years about TDWG has been consistent –an inability to find information about TDWG standards, a lack of quality documentation and a lack of standards integration. The TDWG Infrastructure Project has been working on these issues and we are now in a position where the foundations have been established.
It is time for all of us to recognize opportunities to encourage membership. TDWG needs people associated with museums, herbaria, universities, libraries and other organizations related to biodiversity data. TDWG needs people who are interested and skilled in sharing information on the web, particularly the semantic web. TDWG needs institutional members to ensure that we are meeting their needs. If Neil Thomson’s estimate of around 30,000 ‘natural history’ organisations is fair, think of what we could do with 10% of them and their staff!
Over the past year, I’ve helped to develop a range of resources that may be useful for recruiting new members-
- A general brochure that could be used to inform people about Biodiversity Information Standards (514kb).
- A brochure that outlines our work and calls for help from people with information technology skills (765kb).
- A one-page Word document summarizing the case for sharing biological data using TDWG standards (41kb)
- A presentation about TDWG by Lee Belbin. For general use at conferences and meetings (1.2mb).
- A presentation by Donald Hobern to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC: July 9-12, 2007) provides a useful introduction to TDWG and its standards via GBIF, one of TDWG's key clients (3.9mb)
- An A1 sized poster suitable for outreach (5mb).
- You Tube video clips on TAPIR and LSIDs.
- Executive summaries about ABCD, Darwin Core and TAPIR (TCS is coming soon)
If you are going to a conference or a meeting that is relevant to TDWG, please consider how you may use the opportunity to talk about TDWG. If you have ideas about how we could target new members, please let me know.
Lee Belbin
Lee(at)tdwg(dot)org
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