Data management planning is moving and shaking at all scales—local, national, international—these days. We had excellent conversations at IDCC about coordinating responses to proliferating data policies and sharing experiences across borders and disciplines. All of the slides and materials from the international DMP workshop are available here.

So far the community has responded positively to our proposal for building a global infrastructure for all things DMP. Our big-picture plans include a merged platform based on the DMPonline codebase and incorporating recent internationalization work by the Portage Network in Canada (check out their bilingual DMP Assistant). We’re completing a gap analysis to add existing functionality from the DMPTool to DMPonline and will issue a joint roadmap in the coming months. Drawing together these disparate development efforts also presents an opportunity to set best practices for future work (stay tuned). This will allow us to consolidate value upstream and ensure maximum benefits to the entire community.

To facilitate our capacity-building efforts, we submitted a proposal entitled (what else) “Roadmap” to the Open Science Prize. You can read the Executive Summary on their website here and peruse the full proposal here (also view our snazzy promo video below). The prize seemed like the perfect opportunity to reposition DMPs as living documents using the biomedical research community as a pilot group. We’ll know by the end of April whether our bid is successful. Regardless of the outcome, we would love to know what you think about the proposal.

And finally, an update on the near-future roadmap for the DMPTool. We just added some new API calls in response to requests for more usage statistics and to facilitate integration projects with other data management systems. Admins can now get info about templates used to create plans at their institution (including private plans!) and a list of institutional templates. Check out the updated documentation on the GitHub wiki. The next order of business is working through the backlog of bug fixes. You can follow our progress in the GitHub issue tracker. Once the bugs are eliminated, we’ll circle back to high priority feature enhancements that contribute to our long-range plans.

…well international at least, with global aspirations. The US-based DMPTool and UK-based DMPonline have collaborated from the beginning to provide data management planning services and training on our respective sides of the pond. As more and more funders, institutions, and nations—the entire EU, for instance—adopt data sharing policies, we find ourselves supporting data management planning initiatives farther and wider.

To meet the exploding demand and facilitate connecting the dots (e.g., promoting community standards for DMPs), we’ve decided to formalize our partnership and move toward a single platform for all things DMP. You can learn more about our evolving partnership in this joint paper that we’ll be presenting at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) at the end of Feb. Stay tuned for updates about a joint roadmap and timeline in the coming months. Our individual roadmaps will remain in place for now.

As always, we invite your feedback! And if you happen to be attending IDCC, consider joining us and the DART Project for an international DMP workshop on Thurs, Feb 25 (registration info).

NASA’s Global Digital Selfie 2014 http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/155294