Dear all,
After spending some time getting started as project manager for the
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, I think it is good to let you all
know what I am up to.
For those of you who do not know me, here is a short introduction.
I am a Dutch national, living and working in Luxembourg, a small
country squeezed in between Belgium, France and Germany. Before
joining DublinCore.org, I worked as manager in Technology Solutions at
PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in Luxembourg. For this company,
I continue to be involved in the SCHEMAS Project, a forum for metadata
schema designers (http://www.schemas-forum.org).
Some other work that I have done include consultancy on networking and
interoperability issues, helping organisations in preparing proposals
for European projects, investigating business issues related to trust
and confidence in the Internet, and standardisation issues to support
cultural diversity in Information Technology.
Now on to the work that I do for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
Let me start by saying that for me one of the strengths of the DCMI is
that it is a truly open, international activity with no restrictions to
participation or/and contribution. This is extremely important as the
DCMI is fundamentally a consensus-building community and relies on the
commitment and involvement of its participants.
The open, consensus-oriented nature of the Initiative has also some
drawbacks. In some cases, we see discussions that do not lead to a
clear outcome and documents that have uncertain status. I intend to
take a couple of steps to improve on how we do our work:
- help the chairs of working groups to manage the consensus process,
by providing guidelines for how to plan and report, and how to
move the results of discussions to endorsement and publication;
- introduce a regular reporting mechanism to be able to report to
ourselves and to the outside world what the Initiative is doing.
I am currently working with the chairs of the various working
groups to get an overview of the status of all work items and all
documents that are waiting to be reviewed and issued, and take
steps to get these finalised and published.
At the same time, I am also working with Stu Weibel to review the
process documentation that we have, to come to a more streamlined
operation. My objective is to make the management process as simple
as possible with the aim to make our work in DCMI more efficient and
effective.
One particular thing that I am working on with Stu, is to better
define the publication strategy of the DCMI, taking into account
issues related to quality, versioning and persistence.
You will hear more on these issues soon.
In the meantime, feel free to contact me with any queries, comments
or observations.
Kind regards, Makx.
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Makx Dekkers e-mail: [log in to unmask]
tel: +352 25 33 07 fax: +352 25 33 08 GSM: +352 021 1999 10
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