In 2008 I gave a keynote at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, to a room of oat geneticists who had travelled in from around the world for the conference. The topic was the Pedigree of Oat Lines database — a tag-driven research platform I had designed and built for AAFC.
Building it, then talking to its users
The unusual part of the engagement was the chain: I had built the platform first, and then was invited to keynote about it to the global research community that would use it. Most software gets built far away from the people who eventually depend on it. This one didn’t.
The talk walked through the data model, the reasoning behind the tag-driven structure, and the kinds of questions about pedigree the platform was now able to answer that hadn’t been answerable before. The audience was specialist — these were the people who would log in the next Monday and run the queries.
Of all the speaking work I have done, this one stands alone in the chain it represents — built the thing, then explained it to the people who would use it, with both audiences in the same room.
The related portfolio entry: Pedigree of Oat Lines (POOL) — Tag-Driven Research Database for AAFC, 2008.
