On November 14-15 the database working group, consisting of Edward Slingerland, Harvey Whitehouse, Peter Turchin, Mark Collard, and Pieter Francois met on the U Conn campus in Storrs, CT, for an intense, 2-day meeting to finalize the database structure and prioritize goals for the first year. UBC’s database expert, Maria Robinson, flew in to attend on Day 2.
Voices were raised, tempers were tested, white boards were abused, vague death threats were uttered by Whitehouse, Slingerland briefly attempted to garrote Turchin with a name badge lanyard, people lay prone on the floor under the table in sheer exhaustion and frustration, but in the end a consensus was reached, and we are hoping to have a functioning database up and running, and ready for data entry, by the end of the year, or very early 2013. Our plan is to enter enough data to perform a few proof-of-concept studies, and use this hopefully successful trial as ammunition in new applications to the Canadian government (under the new Digital Economy initiative) in order to acquire more resources to accelerate the population of the database.