Looking back over the RDA plenaries I've been lucky enough to attend 8 out of the 14 of the plenaries. In that relatively short period of time the RDA has undergone a transition from being an enthusiastic meeting with less than precisely defined goals to a major venue for data professionals creating a huge range of different outputs; from education (for example the CODATA-RDA schools) to FAIR data maturity models to PID's for Instrumentation to Open Science Graphs for FAIR data.

It’s always been a privilege to attend the RDA meetings. Those that stand out are the 2nd RDA plenary in Washington where I had the first inkling that perhaps the solutions had more to do with people than technology; the RDA Plenary in Dublin where we realised we needed to run training for ECR’s that would eventually became the CODATA-RDA schools and where I first came across CODATA; SciDataCon 16 and the RDA Plenary in Denver with its focus on more academic papers.