Following the meeting in January 2012 at the IISH in Amsterdam, the European Historical Population Sample Network (EHPS-Net) had their second meeting in Budapest, 4-5 September 2012.

The meeting took place at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office and was organized in coordination with a MOSAIC conference. About 35 participants from 20 different countries attended the EHPS-Net meeting. An introduction to the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) was given by George Alter and Kees Mandemakers in a pre-meeting the day before.

Nine working groups gave a report on the progress they made since the meeting in Amsterdam followed by a discussion. The participants agreed on the official launch of the EHPS-Net portal  which will be around November. In November the final decision on the status and initial content of the proposed E-journal will be made as well.  Both working groups on the development of the IDS merged into one group. They made an ambitious plan to develop extraction software and will show results from December onwards. Another main point of discussion was the way EHPS-Net should go forward with the Consultation Call for Horizon 2020. The group exploring new databases will continue gathering more data on databases. Second step for them is to get in contact with people to digitize the material. Furthermore, they will develop a kit that will help people to hands-on. The working group on education will organize a workshop to define educational objectives for courses in historical demography. In the summer of 2013 a summer school will be organized in Cluj in coordination with the conference Intermarriage through History. Another important item was the current state of documentation of longitudinal databases.  The existing questionnaire will be improved and the group will work on specifying the metadata in DDI.  And finally, the group on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) presented an overview of existing implementations of GIS on historical longitudinal data. They will continue their work on the inventory of documentation on GIS. A new working group on extended IDS was installed during the meeting.

Most working groups will organize workshops at the end of this year or beginning of 2013 to take another step forward. Date and place of the next meeting of EHPS-Net are not decided upon yet, but it will probably be in the autumn of 2013.

Overall, the network made good progress in a pleasant atmosphere.