[Board] OGC Relationship

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I'm taking the liberty of moving (at least part) of this discussion to the
public board list.

I am favorable on the idea of a formal liason relationship with OGC though I
don't consider it particularly critical to us or them since there is already
extensive cross membership and cross pollination.

If we are to have a formal liason relationship, one benefit I would like to see
is the ability for us give some developers access to working OGC documents, and
for those developers to be involved in OGC testbeds, and working groups as
OSGeo representatives.  I believe the OGC portal allows members to setup
accounts for individuals to access the portal.  We could manage a list of
developers-with-access via this mechanism, with the understanding that we would
never have more than some fixed number of developers (or users really) so
authorized.  I think even doing this for 5-10 would be plenty since most
OSGeo project folks with an interest in OGC work already have access through
corporate memberships.

I'm not sure what we would offer OGC in return.  I suspect ultimately what
would be most valuable to them is some sort of commitment to not become a
a "standards development" organization.  This avoids duplication, confusion
in the marketplace, and what they might consider competition.

I'd be agreeable with this, but it must be understood that self-organizing
working groups within and between OSGeo projects are likely to develop
specifications such as GeoRSS, or the web tile specification whether we
encourage it or not, and I don't want to be in the position of discouraging
that.  So we must be careful that such activities are not precluded.   At
most I think the board could offer to not develop and support our own
standards development process - understanding that we won't supress it either.

The other angle might be some sort of more active involvement of OSGeo projects
in OGC testbeds and other IE efforts.  However, it is hard for us to force
project involvement.  It might be appropriate for the foundation to provide
some modest supporting funding for project involvement in OGC testbeds and
interoperability experiments.  For instance, providing travel funding.

Note that there are at least a few people who would like to see OSGeo
become a sort of light weight agile standards development organization.
I'm not keen on that, but it might be prudent to give these folks a chance
to make their case.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org