[OSGeo-Standards] [OAB] [RESTful-Policy.SWG] Encodings and REST - New conversation on standards organizations

[Carl Reed]

A few points of clarification.

First, the majority of standards organizations are membership based, either 
at the national level or at the organizational level. ISO, the ITU and other 
formal de-jure standards organizations have national memberships and 
representatives. Nations financially support the standards organization. 
Organizations such as the OGC, OASIS, W3C, Web3d, Kronos, and most other 
voluntary standards organizations are membership based utilizing a very 
similar membership financial model as the OGC. I collaborate in standards 
work in about a dozen other SDOs. The IETF is the only SDO of those dozen 
that does not require membership dues. That said, the IETF is supported by 
(high) registration fees at meetings and from funding from the Internet 
Society. The IETF is a subgroup of the Internet Society. The Internet 
Society provides the necessary financial support for various IETF, IAB, and 
IESG activities. The Internet Society is funded by organization memberships. 
Regardless of SDO type, typically participant travel and volunteer time is 
paid for by their employer.

Second, based on suggestions from groups such as OSGeo, the OGC is actually 
much more transparent than in years past. For example:

1. More and more Domain Working Groups are open to non-OGC Member 
participation. Important because many use cases, requirements, and best 
practices for OGC standards are defined in DWGs.
2. OGC Interoperability Experiments allow for non-OGC Member participation - 
as long as the non-Member agrees to the OGC IPR terms. Important because 
increasingly, OGC standards are defined and tested in a domain specific 
experiments.
3. The formation of all new standards working groups is now publicly 
announced and non-Members can comment on the charter for the SWG
4. There has always been the 30 day public comment period for a candidate 
standard - although we need to get the message out better.
5. The is the public change request application. Anyone can submit a change 
request.
6. If invited, non-Members can attend OGC face to face meetings. Any working 
Group chair can invite a non-Member to attend.
7. The OGC allows invited experts to participate in standards work. We have 
done this with several standards, such as GeoXACML. This is a SWG decision.
8. OGCNetwork is a public resource.
9. Any organization can respond to a test bed call for participation. You do 
not need to be an OGC Member to submit a proposal in response to a formal 
call for participation
10. A Standards Working Group can vote at any time to release a candidate 
standard for public access. We have done this in many cases, usually to 
share an in progress document with another standards organization. For 
example, at the request of the W3C, we shared GeoSPARQL with the W3C 
community well before the public comment period. Again, however, the 
document sharing is under the terms of mutual agreement in which each 
organizations' IPR policy is respected.

So, following up on the last point, I believe that OSGeo can request the OGC 
share an in-progress candidate standard for OSGeo internal 
review/comment/experimentation. This would require a formal request to me as 
OGC Technical Committee Chair and then formal approval by the SWG voting 
members. Of course, the OSGeo community, as per the OGC-OSGeo MoU would need 
to respect the OGC IPR policy terms and conditions. And of course the SWG 
could vote no if they felt that the candidate standard too immature to 
share.

Comments welcome! And of course, communication can always improve!

Regards

Carl


-----Original Message----- 
From: Michael P. Gerlek
Sent: Sunday, October 21, 2012 3:16 PM
To: Even Rouault
Cc: oab at lists.opengeospatial.org ; 
restful-policy.swg at lists.opengeospatial.org ; standards at lists.osgeo.org ; 
Clemens Portele
Subject: Re: [OAB] [OSGeo-Standards] [RESTful-Policy.SWG] Encodings and REST

Even wrote:

> Finally, I second Volker on the lack of transparency of the process. It is 
> good that
> OGC standards are open when they are finished, but it would be much better 
> if their
> elaboration was truly open. Otherwise there is always the uneasy feeling 
> that money
> and market considerations take over technical merit.

The OGC operates as a membership-based organization, in which interested 
parties pay yearly dues to participate in the standards-making process. The 
dues pay for, among other things, the overhead in involved in that process. 
If you don't pay the dues, you don't get to participate. If they allowed 
people to participate without paying dues, then no one would pay dues and 
the organization would collapse. That OGC's business model, and it is the 
business model of some other standards groups as well.

This means there is certainly the opportunity for bias and influence in the 
standards process. If Acme Corp employee Smith happens to be a particularly 
strong representative on the Frobnitz working group, and if Acme can afford 
to pay Smith to spend a lot of time on the Frobnitz work and travel to 
attend all the meetings, then certainly the resulting standard might be 
tilted in favor of Acme's interests. It is the professional responsibility 
of standards committee members to try and set aside any explicit bias in 
favor of technical merits - but that is, admittedly, a hard line to walk to 
sometimes.

Arguing that OGC should be "more transparent" seems like a nonstarter to me: 
their entire business model is based on dues-based, closed development 
process. Rightly or wrongly, that's just how the OGC works.

-mpg

_______________________________________________
OAB mailing list
OAB at lists.opengeospatial.org
https://lists.opengeospatial.org/mailman/listinfo/oab