The Community Strategy Board (CSB) celebrated its 25th meeting last week! The main topic on the agenda was how to create a vision for the Deltares Open Archive.  Over the past years, we have seen the Open Archive grow organically based on external (and internal) feature requests.  To manage this growth and consolidate its functionality and to have a future vision about and role for such an important component, FEWS Product Management involved the CSB by asking a first series of questions:

• What do you foresee as the primary role(s) for the Deltares Open Archive in the near future?

• What do you see as key elements for the Open Archive, e.g. think of:

  • Content

  • Accessibility (users, user groups)

  • “Point of truth” (read: how “actual” should the Archive be?)

• Would you like to be involved in the scoping and definition of the Strategy/Roadmap?

During the discussion on the Open Archive the CSB members shared information on how they are using (or intending to use) the Open Archive and we also discussed the main purpose of the Open Archive. The question arose how the Open Archive could play a role in providing data to the public. Useful points of attention were provided as input for our strategy for the Open Archive. The CSB stressed the importance of a robust archive which should be accessible at any time. The powerful option of seamless integration maintains key in using the archive in combination with an operational forecasting system. The archive's primary role should be evaluating the performance of historical forecasts and should facilitate 'replaying' of an event. But the archive should and could also be a source of information for other dissemination channels (like warning services), for business intelligence tools or dashboards.

This dialogue was a good starting point for the development of a vision for the Open Archive. The CSB will be closely involved in this development.

We also looked back to the first Delft-FEWS Community talks session, which was seen as a positive experiment that will be continued, with some small improvements. The next Community talk is scheduled for 6 October 2022.