The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) have a long and natural tradition of collaborating. In 2022, the Memorandum of Understanding between both organizations was updated - to pay tribute to ongoing and future activities. In the initial MoU (2008), OGC and OSGeo agreed to work closely to coordinate with each other’s memberships regarding new standards developments and standards changes that may be required as a result of open source programs. Another important aspect of the relationship is to keep each other well informed of the respective activities and directions. Both aspects have proven to be of great importance. One goal was and is to coordinate activities in such a way as to maximize the achievement of both organizations’ mission and goals. That includes to identify open source technologies that can be used as reference implementations for and validate compliance tests developed for OGC adopted standards. Since the first MOU, there has been an increase in OGC on developer focus and engagement of software communities and activities. Increased collaboration has also occured by way of the OGC API code sprints. In addition, key opportunities for cross pollination have evolved given shared missions (FAIR data) and the viewpoint that FOSS4G software is beneficial for all software. The development of the OGC API suite of standards is an excellent example on how the MoU works in practical terms. The OGC APIs are a family of Web APIs that have been created as extensible specifications designed as modular building blocks that enable access to spatial data that can be used in data APIs. These revolutionary APIs make location information more accessible than ever before through the use of RESTful principles, and the OpenAPI specification for describing interfaces. OGC APIs have been tested in close collaboration with the global developer and end user communities through hackathons, sprints, and workshops to provide a modern solution to tomorrow’s location sharing issues. For example, the 2021 Joint Code Sprint organized by OGC, OSGeo and the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) included open source implementations of OGC APIs - and became a standing sprint activity that was repeated in 2022. This presentation provides a deeper dive into the new Memorandum of Understanding and how both open standards and free and open source software can benefit from one another. |