TDWG Business Meeting: elections, subcommittee and working group reports, and TDWG 2027 announcement
David Bloom, Ben Norton, Kit Lewers, Patricia Mergen, Javier Molina
The short versionTDWG is recruiting for key elected roles and subcommittees while reporting a busy standards year and announcing a large joint 2027 meeting in Montreal.
What this was about
The TDWG chair opened elections for secretary, treasurer, the TAG chair (Ben Norton is stepping down), outreach and communications, and several regional representatives, with nominations closing around the end of October. Subcommittee chairs reported: the TAG on Darwin Core Data Package ratification, Latimer Core and MIDS; Time and Place on Montreal 2027 and the search for 2028 hosts; Fundraising and Partnerships on closing TDWG's European branch in favour of an associated-partner model; and Outreach on a rebuilt social media presence. Many of the 19 working groups gave one-line updates, including MIDS public review from 28 September, TCS2 ratification, the completed Mineralogy extension and a recommendation of SSSOM for standards mapping. The meeting ended by announcing TDWG 2027 in Montreal in June (Wednesday-Saturday) with GBIF, OBIS and Canadensys.
Why it matters. It records TDWG's governance state, standards milestones and upcoming opportunities to get involved, useful for anyone tracking the standards pipeline.
In the room
- Elections: secretary, treasurer, TAG chair (open; Ben Norton stepping down), outreach and communications, and Asia, Latin America and North America regional reps; nominations roughly to end of October.
- Regional representatives will review community support fund proposals and be asked to run at least one outreach activity a year, especially in Africa and Latin America.
- The chair asked people to join functional subcommittees even if they don't want elected roles.
- TAG: Darwin Core Data Package ratified; Latimer Core nearly there; MIDS going to public review.
- Time and Place: Montreal next; 2028 is the priority, with offers already discussed for 2028-2030.
- Fundraising and Partnerships: May workshop; idea of outsourcing administration to an umbrella association; TDWG's European branch closed; TDWG now joins EU projects as an unfunded associated partner (e.g. an AI proposal coordinated by Pensoft).
- Outreach: LinkedIn followers grew from ~160 to 1,285; 35 social campaigns and 25 emails; Canva, a short-URL service and a communications brief adopted.
Notable moments
Transcript
Automatically generated captions can contain mistakes, especially in names and technical terms. Times are relative to the room recording.
Read the transcript ↓
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