Thanks for the post Kevin.

We don't need folks to fully adopt data standards for their day to day work and within their databases. Although that would be nice from AGRC's perspective, it's just not going to practical for a lot of folks.

What we want is for folks to be able to translate their data into a common format for data sharing. For most folks this will involve a combination of making changes to what they already have (where possible and painless) and doing things exactly the way they have always done them but coming up with a mechanism to derive a dataset that is standards compliant to share with others.

Free training is a great idea for an incentive. I would add interactive map hosting and support for UGIC conference registration and/or travel money as other possibilities that AGRC could explore.

Of course there are other indirect incentives to local government like getting good data out to businesses, visitors, the tax commission for revenue collection and distribution, etc.

Bert