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New Paradata

The Journal of Official Statistics has a special issue on systems and architecture that looks very interesting. This is a very interesting topic. Many of the authors mention the phenomenon of "silos" or "stovepipes." This is the situation where production is organized our projects rather than tasks. This kind of organization can lead to multiple projects independently developing software tools to do the same thing.

I think this phenomenon also has an effect on the paradata. Since these silos are organized around projects, the opportunity to collect methodologically relevant paradata may be lost. The focus is on collecting the data for the project.

New systems do present an opportunity to develop new paradata. It seems like defining cross-project tasks and developing unified systems is the better option. Within that framework, it might be helpful to think of methodologists as performing a task and, therefore, include them in the design of new systems.

That's the selfish argument anyway. Of course, we can't forget about the costs of these data either.
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