IASSIST 2017 Birds of a Feather sessions: community conversations

The University of Kansas campus in Lawrence played host to IASSIST 2017 during late May 2017, with the annual conference drawing data practitioners, librarians, archivists, and researchers from across the globe. Among the most anticipated elements of the four-day gathering were the Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions, informal gatherings where colleagues with shared interests swap ideas in a setting far less structured than the formal paper presentations and plenaries. These sessions have long served as a kind of communal hearth at IASSIST events, a place where polished slides give way to unfinished thoughts, draft workflows, and practical questions.

What distinguished the 2017 BoF schedule was the breadth of participation. Attendees from institutions such as the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, and the University of Queensland joined counterparts from Europe, North America, and Africa in rooms that often overflowed with chairs borrowed from neighbouring halls. Conversations touched on everything from machine learning workflows to data ethics, and the lack of an official proceedings volume meant that the discussions remained genuinely discursive. Many participants carried notes back to their home institutions, where they would shape future policy on data curation, instruction, and access.

The Birds of a Feather format reflects a wider shift in research culture, where community-driven dialogue is increasingly valued alongside formal publication. For Australian attendees in particular, the chance to sit alongside colleagues from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom was a useful opportunity to compare notes on national infrastructure, given the substantial time difference between Lawrence and cities like Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth. The cross-fertilisation that took place in those rooms arguably produced benefits that would influence data services in both hemispheres for years to follow.

Origins and spirit of Birds of a Feather sessions

Birds of a Feather sessions grew out of a tradition in computing and information science conferences that values peer-to-peer exchange over top-down delivery. At IASSIST, a society long associated with social science data and research data management, the format quickly found a natural home. The 2017 programme organised several BoF slots into the daily schedule, recognising that not every meaningful conversation fits within the strict twenty-minute confines of a contributed paper.

The atmosphere in these sessions differed markedly from the panel discussions that preceded them. There were no lecterns, no formal microphones, and no obligation to deliver a polished argument. Participants circled chairs, drew diagrams on whiteboards, and passed around printouts of schemas that might otherwise have lived only in working documents. A facilitator from the local arrangements committee typically opened the conversation with a few framing questions, but the discussion almost always migrated quickly to practical concerns: who is doing what, who is failing at what, and who has quietly solved a problem the rest of the room has been wrestling with for months.

For attendees travelling from places like Adelaide or Hobart, the sessions offered something that remote webinars rarely replicate. The spontaneous handshake after a useful comment, the half-finished sentence completed by a stranger who turned out to be working on the same problem, the chance to look over a colleague's shoulder at a code repository on a laptop screen, all of these small moments produced insights that no formal programme could engineer. Conference participants often left BoF sessions with more questions than answers, which was widely considered a feature rather than a bug.

Themes that travelled across the Pacific

A handful of themes dominated the BoF conversations at IASSIST 2017, and several resonated strongly with Australian researchers navigating parallel challenges in their own institutions. The first was data curation at scale, particularly in relation to social science repositories such as those maintained under the umbrella of the Australian Data Archive and similar services overseas. Participants compared metadata schemas, preservation policies, and the perennial question of how to balance thorough documentation against timely release.

A second theme was ethics review for data-intensive projects, which connected directly to the legislative environment in Australia. The Privacy Act 1988 and its associated Australian Privacy Principles set a baseline that data librarians in the country must respect, and several BoF groups compared these requirements with frameworks like the European General Data Protection Regulation. Conversations also touched on the My Health Records Act, which had implications for any project dealing with linked health data, and on institutional policies governing the secondary use of survey responses.

A third thread was training and capacity building, a topic close to the mission of the Australian Research Data Commons and the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. BoF participants exchanged ideas about short courses, online modules, and the role of data stewards embedded within faculties. Some Australian attendees described pilot programmes at their own institutions, and several left Lawrence with concrete plans to adapt materials first developed elsewhere. Researchers from regional universities, including James Cook University and Charles Sturt University, contributed practical perspectives on delivering training to geographically dispersed cohorts.

How Australian voices shaped the room

While IASSIST 2017 was hosted in the American Midwest, Australian contributors played an outsized role in several BoF conversations. Representatives from the Australian Bureau of Statistics presented informally on the challenges of releasing granular data while protecting confidentiality, a topic that drew sustained interest from participants working on similar products in national statistical offices abroad. The conversation frequently returned to the practical realities of producing public-use files, confidentialised microdata, and the increasingly important role of synthetic data.

University-based researchers from Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane joined discussions on digital agriculture and global food security, both of which featured as conference themes. The Australian experience with drought modelling, precision agriculture, and supply chain analytics offered comparative material for conversations with colleagues working on analogous projects in Canada, the United States, and sub-Saharan Africa. Several BoF groups returned repeatedly to questions about data interoperability, particularly where agricultural datasets were held by research consortia, private companies, and government agencies operating under different mandates.

Indigenous data sovereignty emerged as a topic where Australian voices offered distinctive leadership. Researchers familiar with the principles articulated by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance, and with work emerging from institutions like the University of Melbourne's Indigenous Studies Unit, helped frame discussions about how data about Indigenous communities should be governed. These conversations fed directly into broader IASSIST debates about whether existing metadata standards adequately represent the values and rights of source communities. The contributions were substantive rather than tokenistic, and many participants from other countries later reported that the discussions had reshaped their thinking on related projects at home.

Carrying the conversations home

The BoF format produced outcomes that travelled well beyond the Lawrence campus. Many Australian attendees returned to their institutions with action items scribbled in margins of printed schedules, including commitments to organise follow-up workshops, draft new metadata profiles, and engage with international working groups. The Australian Research Data Commons used ideas surfaced at Lawrence to inform subsequent rounds of funding calls, particularly those focused on training and on data citation practices.

Practical collaborations also emerged. Several BoF groups produced shared documentation that was uploaded to repositories shortly after the conference, and a few continued to meet by video call in the months that followed. For researchers based in Western Australia or the Northern Territory, where local data services can be relatively thinly resourced, these ongoing international ties provided access to expertise that would otherwise have been difficult to obtain. International networks such as Thermo International showed how informal professional connections could evolve into substantive technical collaborations on environmental monitoring datasets, mirroring the broader pattern visible across BoF outcomes.

There were also broader cultural lessons. Australian participants noted that the egalitarian spirit of the BoF sessions, with chairs rearranged, microphones set aside, and conversation flowing freely across lines of seniority, reflected values that align well with professional culture in Australian academia. The willingness of senior figures from major institutions to sit alongside early-career researchers and PhD students produced an openness that many found refreshing. Some attendees described the experience as a useful counterpoint to more hierarchical conference formats they had encountered in other contexts, and a few returned home determined to organise similar BoF-style events at national data forums held in Canberra and Melbourne.

Practical lessons from the 2017 BoF programme

A handful of observations from the 2017 BoF sessions continue to inform organisers of similar events at other conferences.

Guidance for session organisers:

• Schedule BoF sessions during prime conference hours rather than relegating them to late afternoons, where attendance often thins.
• Provide a designated facilitator, but allow the discussion to wander wherever the room takes it.
• Reserve a room large enough to accommodate walk-ins, and do not be afraid to spill into corridors.
• Capture notes collaboratively on a shared document so that participants who cannot attend can still benefit.
• Encourage participants to bring specific problems rather than broad topics, since concrete questions tend to attract concrete answers.

Guidance for international participants:

• Bring printed handouts or short digital artefacts that can be shared in informal settings.
• Prepare a one-sentence summary of a current problem to seed conversation.
• Follow up within two weeks of returning home, while momentum is still high.
• Pair up with a colleague from a different region to compare experiences afterwards.

Continuing legacy of community discussions

Looking back from the perspective of subsequent years, the BoF sessions at IASSIST 2017 stand as a reminder that conferences are not solely about the formal programme. The values articulated in those informal rooms often outlast the slides shown on the main stage. Communities that formed in Lawrence continued to support one another through mailing lists, shared documents, and the steady accumulation of small favours that characterise healthy professional networks.

For Australian data professionals, the lasting value of the BoF sessions lies in the way they reinforced a sense of participation in an international community. Local infrastructure projects, whether run through universities, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, or consortia under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, draw on ideas that flow through gatherings like IASSIST. The willingness to share drafts, to admit uncertainty, and to learn from one another's failures is something that cannot easily be legislated or procured. It emerges through repeated gatherings of people who recognise that they are working on broadly similar problems.

The community discussions at Lawrence therefore sit within a longer arc of practice that continues to shape research data work today. Each annual IASSIST gathering builds on the conversations that came before, and the BoF sessions remain the connective tissue that holds much of the rest together. For anyone interested in the social architecture of research data services, the 2017 sessions remain a useful case study in how informal conversations, held in rooms borrowed from other events, can shape the trajectory of an entire field.

Region represented	Primary themes	Notable contributions	Ongoing collaborations
Australia	Data ethics, Indigenous data sovereignty, training	ABS presentations, ARDC-funded pilots	Cross-institutional training, metadata profiles
North America	Repository infrastructure, deep learning	ICPSR workflows, university data services	Synthetic-data documentation
Europe	GDPR, open access, persistent identifiers	FAIR implementation, EOSC updates	Joint consent frameworks
Africa	Food security, mobile data collection	Digital agriculture case studies	Smallholder data partnerships
Latin America	Localised metadata, capacity gaps	Spanish and Portuguese workflow examples	Regional data steward networks