April 16, 2018

Spring is Here - and with it comes The Annual PODS Forum, an article in Foundations about PODS, and a Call for Volunteers. Read on for more info.

The Annual PODS Forum is scheduled for May 8th in Houston at the Hilton Americas, from 9:00am-5:15pm:  REGISTER HERE (free for PODS Members; $150 for non-members).  This year's forum includes sessions & panels about Data Transformation Between Companies; PODS business; Business Value for PODS 7.0 (Next Gen); and Breakout Sessions including Data Governance & Field to Office; Data Integration Field to GIS; Next Gen Deep Dive & Modules. The Forum also includes a hot lunch for all participants and a Networking Social Hour after the meetings. An abbreviated version of the agenda is included at the bottom of this email. Download the detailed AGENDA here.

PODS Article in Foundations Magazine: Chad Corcoran, a PODS Association Board Member, has been published in Foundations Magazine.  Download the article entitled PODS - A Data Model Developed by Industry Experts HERE .  If you'd like to see the entire magazine, go here . 

Volunteers Needed: We are seeking qualified volunteers to round out some of our Working Groups and Committees - if you have an interest or talent in either of the following areas, please contact Kathy Mayo, Executive Director, at [email protected] or fill out our Volunteer Interest Form. We are looking for a few volunteers whose interest/expertise match either of these two needs:

• Cloud implementation of our shared master data repository, testing and training environment
• PODS Next Gen (7.0) History Working Group - History focuses on tracking the audit trail of edits performed on routes, and other feature tables within the PODS Next Gen database. The history group will examine the pros and cons of 'inline' history (audits maintained in the same tables as the active features), 'offline' history (audits maintained in a separate schema than the master PODS database) and vendor specific solutions (such as esri Archiving). This working group represents an important step in the progression of the PODS Next Gen data modeling initiative. Volunteers should have an understanding of pipeline systems, pipeline data editing workflows and underlying RDBMS and GIS technologies.