This is the twelfth in the series of short statements from candidates in the forthcoming CODATA Elections. Bonnie Carroll is a current member of the CODATA Executive Committee and is now a candidate for the role of Secretary General.  She was nominated by the USA CODATA National Committee.

My first international CODATA meeting was the 1985 meeting in Jerusalem. Since then I have been involved with both International CODATA and the U.S. National Committee for CODATA. I’ve held positions within CODATA, including the program committee, symposium coordinator, speaker, U.S. National Representative and Co-Chair of the Data Citation Standards and Practices Task Group. In addition, it has been my honor to serve on the Executive Committee to International CODATA for the past four years.

Through all these years I have watched the importance of data as an asset grow in recognition and significance.  Today in the fields of science we live in a data intensive world. For the last 60 years, CODATA has been an international resource and focal point for policy, standards, and practices in good data management.  Now there are many organizations that have entered the field and deal with aspects of the data management lifecycle. I have been involved with several of these other organizations. I have been executive director for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Interagency WG on Digital Data; am the long-standing executive director of the federal interagency CENDI group, which addresses federal information S&T policy issues and programs; have been the executive secretary for the US delegation to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; a member of the Board on Research Data and Information at the National Academy of Sciences; and many other US and international research data and information organizations and activities as the CEO of a private sector information management and consulting organization, International Information Associates (IIa).

It has been an exciting two years for CODATA under the wonderful leadership of Geoffry Boulton as the President and Simon Hodson as the Executive Director.    It is critical for CODATA to be both a leader of and a partner with other organizations as we work to improve the stewardship of our data resources.  We have only to look at the important example of our growing partnership with the World Data System and the establishment of the SciDataCon conference.  With the first International Data Week coming up in September and adding the RDA to our partnership in this major data summit, we are helping to unify and strengthen the global data community.  I know that International Data Week will be a success and I look forward to building on it for the next two years until we meet again in 2016.

Within the organization itself, membership development has been identified as a key priority.  Both from the resource perspective but also from the knowledge and leadership perspective, CODATA needs to reach out and find the means to extend our involvement of nations, organizations, and individuals. The Executive Commit will be looking at how to more effectively involve industry in our deliberations because in many cases they have leading edge technologies and methods.  Coming from a business organization, I hope my unique insights can be useful as we build the CODATA base over the next few years.

As a member of the Executive Committee, I have been an active participant in both our strategic and operational deliberations.  If I am elected to serve as Secretary General, I will be committed to furthering CODATA as an effective and vital leader in the future of data science and data management.