The European Data Documentation Initiative User Conference EDDI17 was hosted by FORS (Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences) and took place in Lausanne on 5-6 December 2017.

The European Data Documentation Initiative User Conference EDDI17 was hosted by FORS (Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences) and took place in Lausanne on 5-6 December 2017.

The conference brought together just under a hundred DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using DDI was invited to attend the conference.

As always, several conference workshops were organised before the start of the conference on various DDI topics and attended by the conference participants.

Before the conference, Azadeh MahmoudHashemi, Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen, Alexander Mühlbauer and Esra Akdeniz took the opportunity to organise a side meeting for the EuroQuestionBank project. Another side meeting took place for the CESSDA Metadata Management project), in which Wolfgang Zenk Möltgen and Kerrin Borschweski participated.

The conference covered a wide range of topics relating to DDI: case studies, mature implementations, early implementations, interplay of DDI with other standards and technologies and projects in early phases in which DDI is under consideration and critiques of DDI.

Keynote speaker Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC presented "DDI is not enough" (see picture) and Ingo Barkow addressed "Research Data Management in Switzerland - a National Perspective"). Irena Vipavc Brvar, Irena Bolko, both Social Science Data Archives (ADP), University of Ljubljana, led a session on perspectives for implementing the CESSDA Metadata Model: "Is Re-use of Metadata Just a Vision? What is Missing for Reality?".

Some numbers:

• 93 participants from 51 organisations (32 academic – thereof 19 archives, 11 official statistics, 4 supranational, 4 commercial) in 20 countries
• 41 women and 52 men participated
• 2 keynotes
• 24 concurrent presentations
• 1 panel discussion
• 3 tutorials
• 5 posters
• 2 reports
• 3 side meetings

The next EDDI conference will take place on 4 and 5 December 2018 in Berlin. The conference is organised by the SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel) at the DIW Berlin (German Institute for Economic Research).

The photograph shows Ron Dekker (CESSDA ERIC Director) during his keynote.

Find out more on the conference website.