Mid-Year Meeting Portfolio Preview

Portfolio Update

It’s Nearly Go-Time in Altoona!

By Ben Craker, Portfolio Manager

The North America Mid-Year Meeting is traditionally a time of project turnover for the Portfolio Management Center. Conference time is a common milestone for working groups to target as an end point, using the chance to be in person to present their deliverables. Meanwhile, other groups kick off new projects at the in-person meeting to help set the tone and align the team.

This year will be a little different – most working groups are not on a completion cadence, so not many are wrapping up or winding down. Additionally, we have listened to member feedback and changed up the agenda to focus more on discussing what is happening in the industry and what the organization needs to address, and less on project updates and report-outs. So, while this meeting will be a little different for working groups, there will be a lot of value for members to network and gain a better understanding of some of the most pressing issues impacting agriculture today.

That means if you are attending, or even if you are unable to join us in Altoona, I challenge you for the next few weeks as you are in discussions with colleagues, suppliers, customers, or other trading partners; be on the lookout for what issues and inefficiencies could be addressed collaboratively in the unique environment AgGateway provides.

Members drive what AgGateway works on. Or, as Jeremy put it, this is “the people’s portfolio management center.” Members set the topics the organization works on, while staff stands ready to help manage the work and keep things moving.

To help frame this request, below is a status update on current working groups, and what we expect will happen with each in Altoona:

WG12 PAIL- ISO 7673-1 | Agricultural Field Operations Data Part 1: Core Concepts had the ballot posted within the ISO technical committee for vote. This is a major building block, moving many concepts and resources leveraged across AgGateway resources like ADAPT to an official ISO standard. This is a significant milestone and will serve as a cornerstone for a lot of future work both within AgGateway as well as ISO/TC 347.

WG27 End User ID will have a highly anticipated session at the Mid-Year Meeting. Jeremy and Jim have spent a lot of time in one-on-one meetings with participating organizations to understand all the different expectations and perceptions related to uniquely identifying end users to get to the root of the issue. Their report-out will set the stage for how the group decides to address this long-standing industry challenge.

WG28 Modus | Plant Tissue is done. A couple of issues were discovered in the GitHub pull request that contained the updates, but those are being addressed and corrected. An updated version should be posted prior to everyone gathering in Altoona.

WG31 Field Operations | Controlled Vocabulary is close to wrapping up. Their session at the Mid-Year Meeting will focus on reviewing their proposed categories to define an operation. So bring your examples to throw at the model to make sure it holds up as well as they expect it to!

WG32 Crop Protection Work Record Exchange also wrapped up their work. An issue has been added to the ADAPT board for discussion on if there is appetite to make a version of ADAPT Standard that would embed resources instead of the current model that references information in the Catalog. If you have opinions go and comment on the issue.

WG33 Modus v2 Schema will be part of the conversation at the Mid-Year Meeting session on observations and ADAPT. We need more participants to discuss how much alignment between ADAPT, Modus, ISO 7673-2, and other resources that members would like to see and what is practical for the labs to implement and support.

WG34 Field Boundary | Obstacles is also close but not quite ready to wrap up. They have applied the model of orthogonal categories of data being combined to identify things pioneered in WG00 with the crop definition model, that was then refined by the Field Operations vocabulary group. They will similarly be reviewing the first proposal of categories and trying out test cases -to see if it holds up.

Finally, there will be one session kicking off the Data Ethics Metadata project. Taking direction from some of the scope and deliverables discussions that occurred after the webinar, the current plan is to pivot the working group to conduct a review of other AgGateway digital resources to understand if or how they might inform how the project moves forward. With all the interest in data ownership and control, this is sure to be a lively discussion that could have far-reaching implications for how data access is managed and documented.

As usual, if you have any questions on the activities of any of these working groups, an idea for a new group, or want to get engaged feel free to contact me (ben.craker@aggateway.org), or sign up for a working group here.