During the GA4GH 9th Plenary meeting in September 2021, I discussed the current progress of the GA4GH Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Advisory Group, a group that I co-chair. Through deep exploration using an approach to build an “intentional community”, the volunteer group has embarked on three overarching projects: Onboarding Tactics, Increasing Participation Levels, and Building Equity by Design into our standards. This talk describes the progress to date, and encourages the community to get involved and contribute to EDI efforts to effect change.

WEBINAR: Negotiating Open Metadata into your Contracts Contract negotiations are important tools for incentivizing publishers and vendors to move to more open business models. Researchers and research institutions have been working together to best plan for and accomplish this shared vision. As part of this transformative process, open metadata must be included to ensure broad access to scholarly resources and other research outputs. As part of Metadata 20/20’s “Your Turn” campaign, the community has expressed interest in exploring and sharing how open metadata can be negotiated into contract language for those accessing and using scholarly resources and other research outputs.

The Long and Winding Road: Sometimes the best path from point A to point B is not a straight line. Follow the twists and turns of one alumna’s career through 8 very different industries and 7 unique functional roles into the position she feels she was always meant to play. At the 2021 LeadHERship Conference at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, USA, I presented an interactive talk about how to make career transitions when you are pursuing a non-linear career.

This presentation describes the role of Identity and Access Management (IAM), contrasts the unique needs for IAM in higher education with those for enterprise systems, and highlights the role that a federation like InCommon provides in fulfilling the these special needs. The goal of this presentation is to provide context for the presentations and materials that will follow during this kickoff workshop. PRESENTATION SLIDES: Orientation: IAM & InCommon Paglione, Laura.

Either Google Fi doesn’t trust its customers or it doesn’t trust its support team (or maybe both!) I recently switched over to Google Fi after a long (20+) year loyalty-fest with Sprint, my first cellular home. With Sprint transitioning into T-Mobile, it seemed like the right time to shop around. Switching to Google Fi was seemingly easy - the plans were simple, and it was seemingly easy to trade in my husband’s and my old phones and upgrade to new ones.

This presentation describes the purpose of identity registration, its role in identity and access management, and specific features of tools that assist in identity registration. It was presented as an invited talk at the BaseCAMP Workshop in July 2021. BaseCAMP is a workshop hosted by InCommon for those new to identity and access management, new to InCommon, or both. PRESENTATION RECORDING: Identity Registration 201 Available only to conference participants.

Over the past few days I again was reviewing start-up pitches in my role as one of the judges of 2021 Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition at Stevens Institute of Technology. Each year undergraduate students turn their undergraduate engineering and business Senior Design Projects into business plans, and prepare elevator pitches to compete for prizes that total $17,500. Similar to last year I have been spending my evenings reading executive summaries and listening to the (video recorded) pitches while providing feedback and asking questions about their business ideas and product approaches.

What do researchers, publishers, librarians, and data repository managers understand about the role of metadata in their work? Metadata is descriptive information about research resources themselves, and it provides important insights for discovering new knowledge, organizing resources, and understanding who the experts are in any field. In this comprehensive study, these constituents responded to a survey to reveal their awareness, knowledge and use of metadata. The results were analyzed and published in the peer reviewed academic journal, Quantitative Science Studies by MIT Press.

Ack! I missed my favorite meeting of the week, the Amazing Women Writing Hour! I was recently reminded that breaks are necessary. I mean a full break where you forget for a moment all of the responsibilities that you need to manage, deadlines you need to meet, and obligations that you have to juggle. I took such a break for just three days last week (spoiler alert - two of those days were the weekend)!

Collaboration is hard in the best of times. Throw in incompatible goals and objectives, and it is downright impossible. Significantly improving how research and innovation get done requires many adjustments to its complicated and interconnected system. One part of this system can rarely make a change independently; to make an effective change, many organizations, processes, organizations, and people must also accommodate and adapt to this change. When all of these actors have clear and complementary incentives to adopt and add to a change, the result can be magical.