International Data Week 2018, Gaborone, Botswana, 5-8 November 2018

Dr Heila Pienaar, Johann van Wyk, Isak van der Walt, Brenda Nsanzya and Samuel Mudau attended the International Data Week 2018 (IDW2018) that was held in Gaborone, Botswana from 5-8 November 2018. IDW2018 was co-organised by the ISC World Data System (WDS), the ISC Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), the Research Data Alliance (RDA), University of Botswana (UoB) and the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).

IDW2018 combined the 12^th RDA Plenary Meeting, the bi-annual meeting of the research data community, as well as SciDataCon2018. The theme of the conference was “The Digital Frontiers of Global Science”. The conference was attended by more than 800 delegates from 64 countries and it was a great opportunity to network and exchange knowledge and ideas with other researchers from across the world on data science, data curation and data management.

Johann van Wyk and Isak van der Walt also presented a paper during a SciDataCon session. The title of their paper was “A Research Data Management Readiness Training Toolkit for African Universities”. This was based on a framework developed at UP to facilitate training of staff and researchers on various topics in Research Data Management.  A photo of the participants in this session also appeared in the recent ASSAf newletter.

Isak van der Walt    

Johann van Wyk