New OGC standards incubator lowers the bar on overhead

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards process is quite nimble compared to other standards development processes, but it still involves multiple steps and the overhead of the formal process discourages developers from participating.  For reference the Request for Comment (RFC) procedure is the most common way for a candidate standard to enter into the OGC standards approval process.  A very good guide has been prepared for submitting an RFC to the OGC and then manoeuvring the candidate standard to final formal adoption.

 

The OGC has been moving in the direction of a simpler developer-friendly process for standards development.  An important motivation has been input from the open source community.  Last year Chris Holmes, who was unhappy with the progress in the development of a standard called GeoPackage, decided to join the GeoPackage Standards Working Group (SWG), to learn about how the OGC standards process actually worked so as to be able to offer some suggestions for improvement from an open source software perspective.  This was important for the OGC perspective for two reasons.  First of all, open source geospatial is an important and growing segment of the geospatial software community, and secondly "open source loves standards" so that historically the first implementations of a standard and the first adopters have often come from the open source community.

It turned out that OGC staff and the members of the SWG were open to new ways of working and the SWG achieved an OGC first by putting the GeoPackage specification out on GitHub, to make it accessible to the open source community.  The traditional OGC way is wikis and Word docs.  For folks without GitHub experience the SWG prepared tips on how to contribute to the GeoPackage specification without having to learn git.  For the OGC putting the specification on GitHub was an experiment, which turned out positively. The resulting standard benefitted from the direct involvement of open source geospatial developers in the OGC standards specification processes. The result was an alternative standards process that focused on early implementations of the standard. The standards process itself was improved by reducing the overhead in the formal OGC process.

The OGC is now taken this one step further and is working on a "standards incubator".  The goal is to make OGC processes even more nimble and responsive to rapidly evolving technology. The standards incubator is intended to provide a setting for members to build and evaluate innovative draft standards in a process that mimics the usual OGC standards development process, but does not result in an official OGC standard.  It is intended to reduce overhead to zero in order to provide a minimalist formal process.