Updates from the Data+Service Alliance General Assembly on Nov 8th 2018

2 weeks back we held our 2nd General Assembly for the year 2018. The assembly was located at the OBC Suisse center in Zurich, close to the Zurich main train station.

We had about 30 participants and 2 guests. The members decided on next year’s budget and updates of the Business Regulations. In terms of budget, we expect a significant increase of revenues for next year, due to both a significant growth in members, and an increase in sponsorship revenues for our flagship event, the Swiss Data Science Conference (SDS). We will use these additional financial means for substantially expanding our member support, and for increasing the number and quality of our public events, in particular the SDS conference.

In addition, six Expert Groups presented an overview of their activities during the year 2018, their highlights and some results. Expert Groups are Alliance’s core activities and often we call them the incubators of projects/collaborations. Each of the presented Expert Group highlighted such a collaboration.

We also took the opportunity to speak the SDS 2018 as the most important event of the year with 400 participants. A flashback video from SDS2018 was shown to the audience, which can also be found on the SDS website. The new concept for SDS2019 was explained, highlighting the new concept of two separate Academic and Business tracks. We are happy to announce that SDS2019 is technically co-sponsored by IEEE and the accepted academic papers proceedings will be published in IEEE Xplore.

The assembly was concluded by a networking apero.

Shortly, the GA meeting minutes and presentations will be sent to the members’ main contacts. If you are interested in the documents, please get them from the main Data+Service contact person in your member organisation.