9th SDMX Global Conference: Empowering Data Communities

The SDMX Global Conference is a biennial event for the official statistics community to share experiences, best practices, projects and information on recent and upcoming developments in the field of national and international statistical data and metadata exchange.

The 9th Conference was held from 29th October to 2nd November 2023 in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The event was co-organised by the SDMX Sponsors and the Bahrain Information & eGovernment Authority (iGA) with the support of UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and Banca d’Italia, and successfully brought together a broad range of stakeholders from national, regional, and international agencies, academia, and the private sector.

The theme of the 2023 programme was “Empowering Data Communities” and explored how SDMX tools and technologies can be leveraged to enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The programme was split into two parts:

Days 1, 2 and 3 – plenary sessions including a keynote speech, special addresses, presentations and panel discussions;
Days 4 and 5 – SDMX capacity building with separate tracks focusing on learning outcomes for beginners and more advanced practitioners.

For the first time an SDMX ‘virtual hackathon’ was held during the lead-up to the Conference which set the challenge of developing an open-source dynamic dashboard software tool for visualising SDMX data. Several excellent submissions were received with the top two selected as joint winners by the judging panel. The results were announced during the Conference opening session.

The event attracted significant worldwide interest with more than 550 people registering to participate. Approximately 230 attended in person with others watching the plenary sessions remotely on YouTube live stream, and on catchup.

In total, over 50 presentations and speeches were made organised under nine separate topics:

Opening session

Session 1: New techniques and technologies for SDMX

Session 2: Innovation in SDMX visualisation

Session 3: Integrating SDMX in the statistical value chain

Session 4: Using SDMX with other standards

Session 5: SDMX data governance and management

Session 6: SDMX partnerships and cooperation

Session 7: Implementation of SDMX and lessons learnt

Session 8: Current and future development of the SDMX standard

Session 9: SDMX capacity building initiatives

Closing panel