Anticipating day 1 of the International Digital Curation Conference

Starting in 3 hours or so in Washington DC. I'm quite interested in the various different national approaches being discussed in the morning. Two questions I would like to ask:

• There is a clash between institutional and subject-oriented approaches (I believe the former have potentially better sustainability, and the latter have potentially better domain scientist data curation skills). The report "Towards the Australian Data Commons: A proposal for an Australian National Data Service" seems to suggest a federated approach, which on the face of it could combine the strengths of both approaches. However, given the clashes of value and approach that so often occur in distributed organisations, how well do the speakers believe such approaches would fare in their culture?
• At the moment it is important to begin establishing a more comprehensive data infrastructure. But how do the speakers envisage sufficient community value to be created for the ongoing bills to be payable (ie how will sustainability be assured in the longer term)? Note in this context the decision by AHRC to cease funding AHDS...
  

These questions could also perhaps be on the table in the penultimate session of the day, a discussion on Global Infrastructure development...