A New Home for the PID Forum at NISO
As the FREYA project draws to a close, one of the team’s final actions was finding a new home for the PID Forum — the online platform for the PID community that was launched at PIDapalooza 2019. Following a competitive tender process earlier this year, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is delighted to have been chosen to host what we are thinking of as the PID Forum 2.0. And, in a nice symmetry, the official transition from FREYA to NISO will be happening at PIDapalooza 2021!
We are hugely grateful to the FREYA team and the current PID Forum moderators — especially Maaike de Jong and Ricarda Braukmann of DANS, who respectively led the original and ongoing development of the Forum. Thanks to their hard work, the PID Forum community now numbers well over 500, and has attracted close to 250k page views since launch. Thanks also to everyone who has contributed to the Forum, for example, by asking or answering questions, posting PID news and updates, sharing useful information, and more. You’ve helped ensure the Forum’s success, including driving up usage of some of these popular features:
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The Knowledge Hub — for those who want to know more about persistent identifiers
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User Stories — real-life examples of how PIDs are being used
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PID News & Blogs and PID-related Events — the places to go for updates and information about the PID world
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The PID Graph — all things PID Graph-related in one place
These and other well-used content areas will continue to be supported on the PID Forum 2.0, and you won’t see any other major changes on the platform until later in 2021, because the FREYA project supports the subscription to the Discourse hosting platform until next October. This gives us all a chance to ensure a smooth transition for everyone involved.
Going forward, our goal is to increase engagement with the PID community by adding new features that better meet your needs. When we asked attendees at the recent FREYA/NISO presentation at the Realising the EOSC event on November 17, 2020 which one thing we should prioritize in 2021, as you can see their answer came back loud and clear — inviting participation from a wider range of PID providers. So that will definitely be at the top of our list! We also want to be more diverse and inclusive in other ways, for example, by expanding our geographic reach, by encouraging more conversations in languages other than English, and by providing a home for PID groups of all shapes and sizes.
Attendees also told us that they want the PID Forum to continue to be a mix of open discussion forum for PID questions and challenges, a place where the PID community can collaborate and coordinate, and a space for technical discussions.
So, what do you and your community want from version 2.0 of the PID Forum? What else should we be prioritizing? Who should be involved, and how? We hope to find answers to these and other Forum-related questions in early 2021, when we’ll be carrying out a survey of PID Forum users and the wider community. We very much hope you’ll share your thoughts with us then!
Most of all, we hope that those of you who are already contributing to the PID Forum will continue to do so in future. Building on and expanding the current support is going to be essential to the Forum’s continued success — and the more volunteers we have to help, the more we’ll achieve (and the less work there will be for all of us!).
We very much look forward to working with you to make the PID Forum 2.0 an even more useful tool for the PID community than version 1.0. Watch out for updates on the Forum and in NISO’s Information Organized newsletter, and feel free to contact us at nisohq@niso.org if you have any questions, comments, or ideas. Thank you!