OGC and the Little Guy
Howard Butler has posted on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s interest in making GeoRSS an OGC standard. One of his concerns is that the very people who created GeoRSS would get locked out of the standardisation process. I think he has a point.
Example: In the past this weblog has been used to discuss some enhancements to the WMS specification. Discussion also took place on the WMS Developer mailing list. In this particular case I personally would have been more than happy to have these ideas included in the WMS specification.
As Howard says, individuals cannot become OGC members. Associate membership for a small company costs USD2,200 per year. However, that doesn’t get you any voting rights on technical issues. For that you need Technical Committee membership at USD11,000 per year. When you add cost of international travel to attend meetings, and the time…well…I’d like to contribute, but no thanks.
The possibility that a standards organisation could appropriate the intellectual property of a group of individuals, and then effectively exclude them from the standardisation process due to their membership requirements is cause for concern. Sure, their work probably gets a boost, but the incentive to innovate doesn’t.
This gives me cause for concern reason to question one of my plans. I was going to talk to a few people in the geospatial and web services area about collaborating on a simple catalogue. The plan was to work on it out in the open like the GeoRSS team did. Now I’m not so sure I want to do that.
Update, 2006-06-10: I should have included some links in my original post.
Allan Doyle, who is a leader of the GeoRSS team, responds to Howard Butler’s post.
Chris Tweedie is “intrigued by OGC’s interest in GeoRSS given its use would benefit largely individuals and web development products – certainly a far cry from OGC’s GIS-centric member list.”
James Fee is in too good a mood to comment on the OGC, and suggests subscribing to mailing lists to keep track of what is going on.
For this issue, check out the GeoRSS email archive.
Why not do it in the open? I think the result will be better for the extra effort it takes. If the effect of all this was to discourage you from doing that, then that's a negative outcome.
I think what I would do differently next time around:
- Start with a document. Use whatever revision control you want, but stick with something that's easy to grab in a single chunk, is easy to print, and is easy to stick notices on.
- Take names. Get an agreement from each person joining that they (a) will put their name on the spec or relinquish their copyright rights and (b) will abide by whatever license your group decides to use.
- Decide on an attribution. Either have the list of people be attributed individually, or name the group and have it be attributed.
I think before GeoRSS is done, we will wind up backtracking and doing all of the above.
But do it! I think there's still a big, gaping hole in the catalog/search space.
Allan Doyle — 10 June 2006, 20:33
Thanks for the benefit of your experience. Good feedback.
It's a shame that a group has to "get legal" just to put some ideas out on the commons, but on the other hand it would be good practice to make sure everyone knows what the expectations are up front.
I'll reconsider the catalogue project.
Andrew
Andrew Hallam — 11 June 2006, 03:30
GIS for Archaeology and CRM » Introduction to GeoRSS — 11 June 2006, 05:40