Dear MIDS community Thanks to a huge amount of work undertaken by many people over the years, we can all actively move forwards with the ratification process. It feels as if this is where we can all relax and take a step back, but in fact this process will almost certainly mean quite a bit of input will be needed over the next few months to make sure we reach the public review in good time with a really strong result. Firstly, the group had a very successful meeting with Sharon Grant, who has agreed to be the Review Manager for the ratification process. The panel of expert reviewers will be selected and invited in the coming weeks. There is likely to be a process in which there will be regular meetings with the reviewers with the aim to complete work they identify before the subsequent meeting. The MIDS website should contain everything needed for the expert and public review and it's looking good https://tdwg.github.io/mids/index.html There is currently some work being done to clarify which parts of MIDS and the website will be normative (content that is definitive and authoritative and require formal processes to change) and non-normative (content that is informative and can be changed more easily). The current thinking that the detailed mapping will not be normative which will make updating this to include new Darwin Core Extensions an easier process. There was a risk identified for the documents held in the Google folder, including the rolling meeting notes, so I have moved these into my own Google drive until a more formal place can be found for them. Everyone should be able to view the files here https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1xEof1yB_Cm1-HWGPKCnyLD9huB4dKMVV. Please request edit access if you don't currently have it. The aim is to start the review process with a relatively clean GitHub issues stack so there is a job to go through these to resolve and close them where possible. There are some issues that are labelled as "for review" and "help wanted" that are good options for everyone to look at. This is an exciting time for MIDS and great to see it all coming together in this way. The meetings will continue to be weekly over the summer. Lots of people will be taking holidays over this time but hopefully we will still be able to keep the progress going. Please join the meetings when you can Thursdays 14:00 UTC https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89321928120?pwd=tc1AG6KqCz5Sv0eca4nvFKF0Df8sja.1 Meeting ID: 893 2192 8120 Passcode: 459138 or follow from the meeting notes here https://docs.google.com/document/d/19ET0p6641ZNzNQG4qNs_jje0LokoKJ9Ls5bhFdUw... or check the GitHub issues here https://github.com/tdwg/mids/issues Elspeth and Cat TDWG MIDS WG Convenors [Logo] Dr Elspeth Haston Deputy Herbarium Curator Tel 00 44 (0)131 248 2800 20a Inverleith Row, Edinburgh, EH3 5LR Scotland rbge.org.uk<https://rbge.org.uk/> @emhaston | Google Scholar | https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9144-2848 Search our Herbarium collections online at http://data.rbge.org.uk/herb The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh<https://www.rbge.org.uk> is a charity registered in Scotland (No SC007983) | Support Us<https://www.rbge.org.uk/support-us> This notice applies to this email and to any other email subsequently sent by anyone at RBGE and appearing in the same chain of email correspondence. References below to "this email" should be read accordingly. This e-mail and its attachments (if any) are confidential, may be protected by copyright and may be privileged. If you receive this e-mail in error, notify us immediately by reply e-mail, delete it and do not use, disclose or copy it. Unless we expressly say otherwise in this e-mail, this e-mail does not create, form part of, or vary, any contractual or unilateral obligation. No liability is accepted for viruses and it is your responsibility to scan attachments (if any). Where this e-mail is unrelated to the business of RBGE, the opinions expressed within this e-mail are the opinions of the sender and do not necessarily constitute those of RBGE. RBGE emails are filtered and monitored.