Report of the GBIF Nodes of Latin- America Meeting in Montevideo (March 2011) Francisco Pando

The node managers of Latin-America met in Montevideo (Uruguay) on March the 18 th, 2011 Taking advantage of the “Workshop on Species information online and digital Libraries (a Plataforma Iberoamericana para la Información sobre Biodiversidad" (PIIB) event Present: Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, Bionet-Andinonet, Colombia, Argentina, (NODES Chair invited) Missing: Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay *, Chile * * No node manager appointed Context

Agenda GBIF 2012 Work Plan New ToR for Nodes Self Organization plans for Latin-America Nodes

On the Work Plan Items nodes wanted to see: 1. Advance the Digital Content – Work on data quality – On collections : Build content in partnership with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative (plant types) and similar 2. Advance Engagement: Participation, Capacity, Partners, Networks – Real training plan – Put in place tracking system for recommendations, suggestions, feed-back and requests from nodes

On the Work Plan Items nodes wanted to see: 3. Advance the Informatics Infrastructure – Portal: Better indexing process – Portal: Diacritic characters handled properly – Available tools working as expected – Mirror system really working (load balance, more frequent roll forward, logs preserved) – Good data usage (logs) reports – NPT–AG analysis taken into account; in fact, NODES should be involved in any development

On the Work Plan Items nodes do not want to see: – GBIF making standards – Priorities defined without taking into account how GBIF mediated data is used. In this regard is very important to have good usage statistics