Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Why FHISO? Indeed!

The Family History International Standards Organisation (FHISO) has released their position paper titled "Why FHISO?" - see the blog announcement at http://fhiso.org/2012/07/why-fhiso/ and the position paper at http://fhiso.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Why-FHISO-v01-04.pdf.



The blog post highlights the reason for FHISO:

"Standards organizations depend on broad support — that includes support across some of the entrenched territorial lines we find in our community.
"Most other sectors have figured out how to bridge those territorial lines — they are already reaping the benefits of open, transparent and democratically developed standards. If we work together as a community, we too can build bridges."
The position paper introduction notes:


"International developers, service providers, family historians and genealogists all depend on a competitive marketplace. Simply put, users have needs that innovative suppliers want to meet. This includes that in an ever more interconnected world, the demands on and benefits of interoperability are great. Change is constant; choice reigns!

"Technical standards play an important role in the competitive market place. Developers and service providers depend on standards in order to deliver innovation and value to users. In the case of genealogy and family history, standards also determine the information that can be exchanged between users’ programs, and between programs and Internet services."

I urge all genealogists to review the position paper and provide comments to the organization via email (fhiso@fhiso.org).  I also urge all family tree software developers, genealogy record collection providers and online family tree providers to become members of FHISO and work together to achieve a unified, common-sense, non-proprietary standard for family history research and documentation.  

The FHISO blog post states:

"One community, one standard. We are stronger and better together. Let’s sort out the issues and start making things happen.
"(1) Don’t be shy! Comments about “Why FHISO?” are welcome on this blog post, but if you prefer, comments via e-mail are welcome, too. fhiso@fhiso.org.
"(2) We’ve opened up a page on the BetterGEDCOM wiki about this position paper.http://bettergedcom.wikispaces.com/
"It’s a wiki, so if you are not already a member, join up and comment."
Thank you to the nine-member, international group that have formed and developed FHISO and this position paper over the past seven months.  They are doing a service for all of the genealogical community.
Copyright(c) 2012, Randall J. Seaver

1 comment:

Andrew Hatchett said...

Randy,

Thank you. Your support with respect to FHISO's efforts is greatly appreciated

Andy Hatchett
www.fhiso.org