NADDI 2018, the 6th Annual North American DDI User Conference, took place April 4-6, 2018, in Washington, D.C. The conference was hosted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and was attended by nearly 90 participants.
The conference program included 25 presentations, 5 posters, and 2 workshops, and opened with a plenary panel on the importance of open standards in federal statistics and research. Plenary panelists included: John Abowd, Associate Director for Research and Methodology & Chief Scientist, U.S. Census Bureau, and Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Cornell University; Robert M. Groves, Executive Vice President and Provost, Georgetown University, and Director, U.S. Census Bureau (2009-2012); and John H. Thompson, Executive Director, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS), Director, U.S. Census Bureau (2013-2017), and CEO, NORC at the University of Chicago (2008-2013). Margaret Levenstein, Director of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, moderated the panel.
In their remarks, the plenary panelists emphasized the increased demand for metadata standards and trained metadata specialists. "We are moving into a world of data that is much more complicated than the old world. Your knowledge is needed....This is an era of unprecedented opportunity for implementation of standards," noted Dr. Groves.