March 2022 marked my 3-year anniversary at OGC! As I look back at those 3 years – 2 of which occurred during the tumultuous COVID-19 pandemic – I feel proud of the accomplishments and changes that we have made during this time:
- We rebranded OGC with a new look (we also have a new website in the works – expect to see it in June ‘22).
- We shifted our messaging from ‘we develop standards’ to ‘why we develop standards.’
- We now identify ourselves as a collective problem-solving community of global geospatial experts and users committed to making geospatial/location information Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable (FAIR) – via standards, innovation activities, and partnership building.
- We invested in strategic collaborative projects connecting people, organizations, systems, and data in areas that heavily impact our society and the future of our planet: disasters, climate change, health, and agriculture (to name but a few examples from the OGC Innovation Program).
- In the process, we invested in the global geospatial community by giving away 30% of OGC’s annual revenues to our member organizations
- We accelerated the mainstreaming of geospatial via our OGC APIs and targeted investment in developer resources and connections.
- In the process, we also made OGC more accessible to the startup community by creating a startup membership category at a 50% discount to our associate membership rate.
- We championed new topics that are critical to our members and the community’s growth and success – like New Space, Digital Twins, Metaverse/real-time 3D, GeoAI, and Ethics.
As I embark on my fourth year at OGC, our mission continues to be that of making geospatial information FAIR at scale! And, in 2022, I can’t think of a more scalable (or impactful!) way to do that than via cloud-native geospatial. No one can deny that ‘the cloud’ is triggering a fundamental shift in how geospatial data is stored, shared, accessed, integrated, and analyzed. If we succeed in creating a foundation for cloud-native geospatial standards:
- Imagine the radical simplification of the effort and cost needed to share and use geospatial information!
- Imagine the explosion of innovation when we make the power of geospatial accessible to everyone!
As you might have guessed, I’ve spent some time with our inaugural visiting fellow, Chris Holmes, to get to this point. I’m thankful for his efforts in bringing the community together to accelerate our path to cloud-native geospatial. And we sure need every bit of support on this journey as it requires a sustained effort to bring every piece of location information to the cloud in standard formats to empower the development of the next generation of tools that will truly unlock the value of location.
Join me on this ride of a lifetime as we take geospatial and OGC to the next level! We are kicking things off with a Cloud-Native Geospatial Community Outreach Event on April 19-20 that is already breaking registration records. In many ways, the event is the kickoff of a global activity to accelerate and advance cloud native geospatial standards. Come join us!
