The SIFA Annual Meeting January 20, 2009
Posted by ajackl in Educational Technology, Schools Interoperability Framework, SIF.Tags: http://technorati.com/tag/SIFAnnualMeeting2009
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So- I just spent four wonderful days in pre-Inaugural Washington DC. As usual we had the SIF Association‘s annual meeting, held elections, had board meetings, and generally planned, specc’d, and kibitzed.
We did quite a bit of good work resolving some technical issues with the XML Schema of version 2.3 of the SIF Specification release that is now finally coming close to release. We also dealt with some of the details of re-designing processes and growth as the organization continues to grow and add new staff (7 now) and new members. We are close to compiling all the charters that will define the scope of the Columbus release.
It was exciting to welcome Kevin Harrison from Virginia, David Holt from Wyoming, and Matt Howard of eTech Ohio as new members to the Tech Board, and Mark Reichert from CPSI, Ann Savino from eSchoolData, and Jason Wrage (albeit temporarily) as new members of the Board of Directors.
Looks like Andy Elmhorst of EduStructures and myself are still the co-chairs of the Technical Board.
Reading the Tea Leaves 
So, was it all sunshine and roses? Or were there any empassioned debates…
Any news about web services? Or decoupling the data model from the protocol?
No- not all sunshines and roses. However, that in my mind is one of the things that marks SIFA as an Assocaition. We can have heated debates and passionately held views and still respect and honor each other.
There were quite a few debates about outreach, about how stringently to enforce some of the rules suggested and specified in the spec when designing the XML Schema representations, and how to balance staff and volunteer authority and workload. It got quite, ummm, exciting at times!
Services took off and a lot of work is being done with them around Student Record Exchange and ID Locator. More to come on that soon!
There is strong, if not universal, agreement on decoupling the infrastructure from the data model That is certainly moving forward.