Revamped Agenda Makes Impact

Annual Meeting and Conference

Revamped Agenda Makes Impact

By Jeremy Wilson, EVP/COO and North American Director

I’m ready to call the AgGateway Annual Meeting and Conference a solid success for what it was able to accomplish as far as member engagement and idea generation. This is mainly because we took a different approach to the program, and much to my delight, you embraced it and actively engaged as I hoped and dreamed you would.

Long time AgGateway volunteers will remember it like it was yesterday, but for everyone else, here’s a quick history on our approach to generating the ideas that eventually end up moving into working groups.

Prior to the year 2020, AgGateway used industry segment “Councils” to conduct meetings and generate ideas. While there was value in these gatherings, too often it devolved into “airing of grievances” that never moved into consensus on “what to do about it.”

This process was upgraded with AgGateway 2020, which introduced the “meetup” concept for idea generation and the creation of “working groups” to establish and continue work in between the two annual events.

This year, with the Annual Meeting's tremendous schedule shakeup (undertaken as a result of member feedback), and the complete elimination of the meetups, we had to come up with a new way to gather, brainstorm, and develop ideas.

The concept was to gain consensus from member input on a key topic, bring in expert speakers on the subject to build knowledge and perspective, then divide you into smaller groups to just talk through everything. Artificial intelligence was of course the big topic, but everything was on the table.

Table leaders were assigned to collect and send me sentiments and consensus from the discussions, and as I write this article I have feedback from about half of the session leaders, due to get the rest of them soon. In the meantime, I want to talk about some common things, some common trends that we've seen coming out of the Conference:

Data Policies and AI: The reports use different terminology to describe this, but all of them indicated that it may be time to think about creating some data policies around sharing data that goes into AI models.

Data Labels: There's constant chatter around how we label data that gets loaded into these AI models, and we probably need to do some more consideration and talk around that as well.

Data Breakout at MYM or Annual?: There seems to be enough discussion around data-related topics that we might consider holding a breakout session focused on data in general. What are people loading into models? Do we have the right messages built?

AI Training: I’m not sure how or if this is an AgGateway exclusive program, but it was discussed that perhaps we need to develop a training or education session for the ag sales forces/agronomists/employees about the value that AI can bring them and what it can bring to their customers. It is complex from the customer side, since each level has a distinct customer category in the value chain. But it’s pretty clear that we should be looking into participating in the training at multiple levels, whether we are originating it ourselves or working with partners.

Digging into connectCenter

The other thing we introduced this year at the annual meeting was the idea of managing more AgGateway message standards and message profiles into connectCenter, which is a tool jointly developed by NIST, OAGi, and other open-source contributors for creating standard data models, creating message profiles, and expressing the message profiles as schemas or API specs. Several of the data model standards we use are already loaded into connectCenter, and we have created some message profiles (the technical term specified by ISO 15000 is Business Information Entity, or BIE).

Some take the view that we’re just dumbing messages down. Perhaps that’s true. But it’s what we’ve been doing for two decades. But now the process is more efficient, the output more useful, and the resources more manageable over time. We are just specifying the parts of a whole data model relevant to the task at hand (i.e., business context). For years we have done this with Excel files we have called “mapping files” or “implementation guides”. This accelerates implementation. One never needs to use an entire standard data model in a specified business context, so bringing developer focus to the relevant parts avoids the requirement to comprehend the entire data model, much less implement support for it.

We had two very well-received sessions at the Annual Meeting, and we really feel that moving into the Mid-Year Meeting, we could have an entire track focused on that.

We are getting feedback from our members that they would like the option to express some Ag eStandards and AgXML as JSON. connectCenter should support this soon. Doing so will streamline the ongoing maintenance process, but more importantly, allow our members to choose what format they would like to use in an integration. If we commit the time and resources to specifying those message profiles (i.e., BIEs) in connectCenter, we could put that message out in whatever format they choose.

If we went this direction my question to you is, can we begin to educate more of our member volunteers about how to run and operate connectCenter, and stand up working groups to identify the first messages we want to build it to make these new formats available?

This would not be a difficult task if we have five or six people willing to put in twenty hours of focused effort. We can easily stand up a working group to address a message or two.

Again, My Thanks

I’ve said it many times already to many of you, but I need to say again how thankful I am for all of you who attended and participated in this year’s Annual Meeting and Conference and endured me ripping the band-aid off on the agenda and trying something new. This experience has relit a fire I haven’t had in me since the early days of ADAPT.

We took conversations that only happen in the hallway and brought them into the meeting room and got engagement from people across the agriculture value chain. It was an amazing week.

I also have to say thank you to the AgGateway staff for standing with me on this new approach to the agenda, and in particular Paul Schrimpf with whom I have concocted many crazy ideas over our two decades of interaction. He brings the people together and creates the playing field so I, and all of you, can hit it out of the park.

So, what do you think? Give me a call, send me an email, or sign up for a working group. But don’t sit still! We need you to be involved and engaged.