OGC’s Stuttgart TC Meeting: more than understanding only train station*
After 7 years, an OGC Technical Committee (TC) meeting has again come to Germany, this time from the 10-13 September 2018 in Stuttgart - more or less the backyard I grew up in. More than 200 people attended our 108th TC Meeting, held at and hosted by the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (HfT Stuttgart).
The week saw the usual blend of excellent meetings, an Ice Breaker in the Student’s Bar Block 4, a Pub Quiz where you could check your knowledge about German and Stuttgart culture, politics, and trivia, as well as the Geospatially Interoperable Games and Simulations (GIGS) Summit, the SensorThings API Summit, the kick-off of the Citizen Science Interoperability Experiment, and the annual OGC Gardel’s Award presentation - this year’s recipient being Joan Masó from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (CREAF).
In September 2018, the OGC/WMO Hydrology Domain Working Group (HDWG) held its ninth annual workshop marking ten years of successful collaboration between the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and OGC in hydrology and informatics. The working group has generated interoperability experiments, engineering reports, discussion papers, best practice documents, and four approved OGC standards - part of the WaterML2 suite. 
After almost 18 years with OGC, 14 years as President, I plan to transition to part-time work with OGC early next year. In my new capacity, I will focus on strategic opportunity development in the areas of membership value and growth, and the advancement of key programs and initiatives in support of OGC’s technology and marketplace priorities.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of ApacheCon. For the last several years, we’ve had a strong representation at Apache from projects in the Geospatial sciences space. Just as collaboration is so important in the sciences, it is at Apache, and Apache seems to be a great fit for Geospatial projects, giving an open, collaborative way to work on the code that matters to Geospatial scientists, across the boundaries of corporations or research organizations. Through these projects, the ASF has forged a great relationship with OGC, and for the last couple of years we’ve had Geospatial tracks at ApacheCons in Vancouver, Seville, and Miami. This year at ApacheCon North America, in Montreal, we once again are excited to be featuring a track of Geospatial-focused talks, in cooperation with OGC.
As part of its Innovation Program, OGC invited international experts to two sessions at this year’s International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) in sunny, hot Valencia, Spain, the week of July 23rd. 
I’m very pleased to be joining the staff of OGC as a Director of the Innovation Program, in a new and exciting phase of an involvement with OGC that has extended over many years and almost as many roles. 
