PIDapalooza 2020 in Lisbon
2020 started off well for PID-lovers because it was time for PIDapalooza again. This year, the fourth edition of the open festival of Persistent Identifiers was held in Lisbon. Of course FREYA partners were there and mingled with about 200 other festival visitors to present recent work and discuss and exchange ideas.
#PIDapalooza2020 was opened with the traditional lighting of the eternal flame and a taste of Portugese music. The conference programme then started with a keynote by Maria Fernanda Rollo, associate professor at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa who talked about their efforts to establish and integrate ID services in the Portugese higher education system. After the plenary, PIDapaloozans spread out for a first round of parallel session blocks. The half-an-hour sessions allowed for discussions around various topics, ranging from PID communities, sustainability, social and technical aspects of PIDs, to putting principles into practice, and of course the even more interactive PID Party! sessions.
During the first parallel block, FREYA hosted a session with the winner of our 2019 ambassador competition. Melroy Almeida, ORCID Technical Support Analyst at the Australian Access Federation (AAF), travelled all the way from Australia to join us in Portugal. In his presentation, Melroy showcased his work on building ORCID collaboration networks using a PID Graph and establishing connections between different identifiers.
Just before lunch, the festival crowd could learn about the ins and outs of the EOSC PID Policy. In their session, members of the EOSC FAIR working group presented the first draft of the policy and encouraged community feedback. Many points were raised in an active discussion, stressing for instance the importance of community governance and open consultation, but also raising fundamental questions about what a PID is to the EOSC. The consultation process is still ongoing and everyone can contribute and stay updated about developments, for instance through a special category that was established the PID Forum.
In the afternoon of the first conference day, our colleagues from ROR organized a session where participants could work on curation use cases in small group discussions. ROR celebrated its unofficial first birthday at PIDapalooza, holding a community meeting the day before where - amongst other things - Christine Ferguson (EMBL-EBI) presented the FREYA work on organizational IDs in practice to the rest of the community.
The first day of #PIDapalooza2020 concluded with a keynote from Beth Plale, program officer at the National Science Foundation in the United States, who explained her view on the process and challenges in the open science developments. In the evening, PIDapaloozans gathered for a pub-quiz were speculations about the location for PIDadpalooza 2021 were warmly welcomed. Although no right answer was given, rumor has it that we will not be traveling to Wyoming.
On the second conference day, some of us got up extra early for a side meeting that FREYA had initiated following our work on the PID Commons. A number of people were brought together to brainstorm about issues concerning sustainability, community coordination and best practices. Despite the early morning, discussions were active and a couple of possible next steps were identified. You will hear more about this from FREYA in the near future as we further assess the landscape and community needs.
The official #PIDapalooza2020 programme for day two kicked off with a series of lightning talks by brave volunteers who pitched their PID work in just a few minutes. Later that day, FREYA got the opportunity to gather input from PIDapaloozans during our PID Forum session. Pidforum.org was launched one year ago at PIDapalooza 2019 and we felt that this was a good opportunity to get feedback on how to continue. We brainstormed about making the pidforum.org more engaging, stimulating more communities to join and assessing additional use cases. Moreover, we asked feedback on the FREYA knowledge hub, and discussed the future of the PID Forum as well as its relation with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Just after lunch, the festival crowd could enjoy the third keynote by Kathryn Kaiser, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama in Birmingham sharing here story of “Dancing with the scientists: The Costs of Piddling in Science without PIDs”. The afternoon was further filled with 30 minute parallel sessions blocks again which were acceptionally well-timed with the help of the moderators. PIDapaloozans could visit a session from EMBL-EBI on identifiers.org (see), ORCID on the ORCID US community (see) or join the interactive PID Party sessions (see) before the festival was closed in a plenary ceremony on Thursday afternoon.
Although, the eternal flame was (temporarily) extinguished again at the end of PIDapalooza2020, our nails still look pretty, and we are already excited to continue the work and meet the community at our 2020 events and of course online on the PID Forum.
Want to know more?
All PIDapalooza 2020 presentations are available on the PIDapalooza Zenodo site for anyone to revisit.