5th adc meeting

10. Best Practices

R. Duerr explained that the Best Practices Wiki will be a clear contribution of GEOSS to the global community, it: provides an open forum for converging on best practice recommendations and reviews; reaches out to a broad community and; is a flexible structure that can be easily adapted using lessons learned. The Best Practices Wiki is available on the web and provides a template example.

The concept of operations includes the following steps: an individual or organization proposes a practice for consideration as a “best” practice by submitting an entry in the wiki; submitted practices undergo an open peer review process in the wiki (comments in the wiki are publicly accessible, facilitating a moderated community dialog); editors work with their communities to encourage dialog and submission of comments and; editors also assure that malicious insertions are eliminated (original contributors should also monitor activities).
A prototype Wiki was implemented on the web in February 2008 with a call for comment. The GEO Executive Committee reviewed and approved the Wiki approach for the Best Practices Registry. Suggestions of the Executive Committee were incorporated into an update completed April 2008. The Wiki began initial operations in June, 2008 following ADC and GEO ExCom approval. Additional Associate Editors are being solicited. There will be a one-year period of initial operations and then there will be a review of efficacy of the wiki approach to facilitate propagation of best practices for GEOSS. The CEOS WGISS Interoperability Handbook has been entered as a document and 9 practices have been submitted under data and architecture and 11 submitted under user engagement. Expert volunteers are being submitted to build and maintain the Wiki content.
T. Van Zyl commented that there needed to be a link between the registry and the wiki that showed best practices related to use of standards. R. Duerr agreed that links need to go both ways.
It was asked on how competing best services could be prioritized. R. Duerr answered that it would be OK if different groups had different best practices. It would be a challenge to follow usage (e.g. number of users) as criteria for prioritizing.
There was a comment on the possibility of using Wikipedia in order to have a larger audience. R. Duerr answered that the process was a little different as GEO has its own community of moderators.