Last summer, I became Chairman of the IPTC. My goal as Chair is to make IPTC better by improving the face-to-face meetings and improving how we communicate. So, how are we doing?

We recently held our Spring face-to-face meeting in New York, NY. Feedback from attendees was that the meeting was a success.

One of the things we did differently in this meeting was to put less emphasis on formal reports from the different standards initiatives within IPTC and more focus on active discussions, even when not connected to a particular standard. We held five topical sessions:

• Taxonomies in news and the semantic exchange
• Sports working session on Sports-in-JSON and new semantic tools in SportsML 3
• HTML in NewsML-G2
• Video metadata
• APIs

Generally, the feedback on these was very positive. The main complaint was that sessions were held in parallel, whereas some people wanted to attend more than one topic session at the same time.

Also, taking advantage of our location in NYC, we were able to include a wider net of organizations and individuals in our meeting than might other wise attend – including Bloomberg, NPR, Business Wire, PR Newswire.
Overall, the meeting was much less formal than in recent years – we only had one vote (for a NewsML-G2 update). Hopefully, the meeting was a little friendlier and less intimidating for new attendees.

We are planning on building on this experience for our next face-to-face meeting 1st-3rd June in Warsaw. You can see some of the ideas that have been suggested already and please get in touch if you would like to suggest a topical session for either Warsaw or our October AGM in London.

Stuart Myles

Chairman of the Board of Directors

An earlier version of this post appeared on smyles blog.