OGC to assume GeoRSS?
One area where the OGC model of standards development miserably fails is in the world of geohackers, enthusiasts, masher-uppers, and open source developers (see this Directions Magazine article for more background on OGC’s sometimes conflicting roles in the GIS industry). OGC is a membership organization, and even though they might have a lot to contribute to the discussion, individuals don’t generate any revenue for OGC and aren’t allowed to join. But the geohackers don’t really need the overhead of OGC either. They have the tools they need to develop a standard at their fingertips — an email list, a spirit of cooperation, a text editor, enthusiasm, and example applications. Raj Singh, Josh Lieberman and Allan Doyle demonstrated this by leading and coalescing the development of GeoRSS through EOGEO maillists.
The OGC is a faith-based initiative. The OGC is an industry-based organization that agrees upon GIS standards behind closed doors, releases (some of) those standards to the world, and hopes that members (and third parties) implement those standards to the specification. There is a certification process where an organization can buy a stamp of OGC approval for their application or implementation. Not every application or organization that participates in OGC has the official stamp, however. The implementation of OGC specs for the large GIS vendors historically has been uneven at best, with bits and bytes dangling about — giving the hope and appearance of interoperability but ultimately failing to deliver on the promise. In fact, in many ways it has been the small vendors and open source implementations like MapServer and GeoServer that have carried the torch of true OGC interoperability.
Yesterday, Carl Reed of OGC stated that he had posted the contents of most of the GeoRSS website as a white paper for specification consideration within the OGC. This is problematic for more than a couple of reasons, as Allan outlined in his response. First, I don’t think that GeoRSS ever asked to be an OGC standard. Second, the OGC white paper completely disregarded the Creative Commons license and claimed “Copyright © 2006 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. All Rights Reserved.” on a document where most of the contents were generated by the participants of the GeoRSS list and website. Third, even if there was popular interest by the members of the GeoRSS list to have GeoRSS be an OGC standard, a significant portion of them would be locked out of the development process because individuals can’t be members of OGC.
This move by OGC is very troubling. It appears the OGC leadership are trying to take the GeoRSS standard, which the members of georss.org developed out in the open, and stick it behind the OGC firewall in an attempt to gain membership revenues and derivative revenues (if there ever are any, ala Dave Winer and the sale weblogs.com to Network Solutions) from GeoRSS. Maybe they are trying to get on the Web 2.0/Where 2.0 bandwagon, but I don’t think shooting the driver (georss.org) and holding the wagon ransom (buy an OGC membership and you’ll get to participate) is an even remotely reasonable way to go about it.
Hopefully, I’ve got the story completely wrong and the old saw about “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence” applies in this case. Either way, the situation stinks.