DDI member representatives voted in March 2022 to elect one member to fll Joachim (Achim) Wackerow's vacancy on the DDI Scientific Board. Seventeen of the 28 voting eligible DDI member representatives participated in the election. According to the Alliance Bylaws, the election is decided on the basis of those candidates getting the most votes.
The election results (number of votes are indicated in parentheses):
- Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen (16; one representative did not wish to vote)
The Scientific Board is composed of seven voting members elected by the Members of the Alliance. The Executive Director and the Chair of the Technical Committee are ex‐officio members, without internal vote. The Scientific Board may appoint up to two external Advisory Members, without internal vote. The Scientific Board is the scientific and technical body of the Alliance which represents the Scientific Community. The Scientific Board proposes the scientific work plan to the membership for approval and facilitates the scientific and technical work activities.
I want to thank Wolfgang for accepting the nomination and for his willingness to serve on the Board. Wolfgang's biosketch and position statement are listed below. I also want to thank Achim Wackerow for his many years of service to the DDI scientific community.
Sincerely,
Jared
Jared Lyle
Executive Director, DDI Alliance
ICPSR, University of Michigan
Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen
Biosketch
Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen is a researcher at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany, and has been involved in DDI activities since his start at the Data Archive in the late 1990s. He took part in many of the annual DDI training and workshop series at Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics in Wadern, Germany, where he worked on further development of the standard and published several working papers together with colleagues from the DDI Alliance. Both at GESIS and within CESSDA, he has been actively promoting the DDI standard with database development and standardization projects. These topics were also covered by presentations at IASSIST and EDDI conferences. Wolfgang is also a member of the programme committee of the European DDI User Conference (EDDI).
Position Statement
As a Social Science researcher with some technical and Computer Science knowledge, I am concerned with providing practical solutions with a DDI standard that supports real world use cases. I like the promise of the DDI Alliance to cover the whole data life cycle of research data and to help organizations and individuals to collaborate on the basis of data and metadata. I am convinced that the combination of subject independent standards with standards that are designed to support subject specific research will help to create a vivid working environment for researchers using data and metadata as their basis of knowledge.