The Family History Information Standards Organisation is seeking nominations for the Board of Directors.

The election will be held online with voting being conducted from September 4, 2021 to September 18, 2021, followed by an Annual General Meeting held online on Saturday, September 25, 2021.

Five positions are open for election. These are:
Chair – the Chair is the head of FHISO and has overall responsibility for the smooth running of the Organisation.
Technical Coordinator – the chair of the Technical Standing Committee, with overall responsibility for FHISO’s standardisation and specification work.
Three Directors at Large to fill other roles on the board.
The Technical Coordinator position is vacant for this election because Richard Smith is retiring mid-term, due to work commitments.
One Director at Large position is continuing from their previous election and will be up for election again next year.

Terms of office run from the AGM on September 25, 2021 for two years.

It is expected that some board members will hold several roles, for instance, the roles of Secretary and Treasurer are currently held by the same individual. The details will depend on the skills and interests of those elected. See the bylaws (https://fhiso.org/bylaws) for more information.

Candidates standing for Chair or Technical Coordinator may also stand as a Director at Large, and we encourage this. The elections of Chair and Technical Coordinator are held first, and if the person elected is also standing as a Director at Large, they will be removed from the Director at Large election. Candidates may not stand as both Chair and Technical Coordinator.

If there are more than three candidates to serve as Directors at Large, a single election will be held for these three positions. The ballot will allow members to rank candidates in preference using the single transferable vote system, and the top candidates will be elected to the board.

Members who wish to put themselves forward as a candidate or who wish to suggest a possible candidate for an office are invited to contact us by email at fhiso@fhiso.org.

The FHISO Board is a small working board. Each member is expected to have their own remit which might be technical or administrative, and might involve outreach or promoting FHISO’s activities. We are looking for candidates who can commit the time needed to pursue their remit effectively, however we understand that a board made up of volunteers will have other commitments and try to make allowances for that. If you’d like to understand more about the work involved, contact us at fhiso@fhiso.org.

Our current board has members in many different time zones and we schedule our meetings at times to best suit board members. The working language of the board is English, but we will endeavour to support any board members for whom English is not their first language.

We are now looking to bring new members on to the board, with fresh ideas and new enthusiasm to help drive FHISO forwards in its mission. We hope you continue to believe in that mission, as we do, and ask that you consider whether you can help us achieve it by joining the board.

Even if you don’t feel able to stand for election to the board, we ask that you renew your membership and vote in the election. FHISO’s main expenses are the costs associated with being incorporated in Arizona. For a sustainable future, we need enough members to cover these costs. A larger membership also helps us ensure our work is progressing in the direction the genealogical community wants it to take.

I’m sure many of you will have seen the announcement from FamilySearch of a new version of GEDCOM, the first new version that they have released for over 21 years.

Since then we’ve had a number of enquiries about FHISO’s involvement in its development, our opinion of this new standard, and how it affects our future plans, particularly with regards to ELF (or Extended Legacy Format, designed to be backwards compatible with GEDCOM 5.5 and 5.5.1). I’d like to take this opportunity to answer these questions publicly on behalf of FHISO.

FamilySearch GEDCOM™ version 7 was developed on behalf of FamilySearch (which is operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) by a team of contributors from a wide range of stakeholders. FHISO’s Chair, Luther Tychonievich, was invited to represent FHISO during the development of FamilySearch GEDCOM 7, as were multiple other FHISO members, though the confidentiality agreements during the development prevented us from disclosing the details of this involvement to FHISO members. Luther served as drafting editor of the standard with his time being funded by his employer, the University of Virginia.

However we would stress that it is a FamilySearch standard, not a FHISO standard, for the simple reason that it has not been ratified as a FHISO standard by a vote of our members.

This new standard is closely based on GEDCOM 5.5.1, though it is not entirely backwards-compatible due to the removal of certain constructs which complicated the proper parsing of GEDCOM. For example, the ANSEL character set (which was withdrawn as a NISO standard in 2013) is no longer the default and only UTF-8 is permitted, while the LANG tag now uses IETF BCP 47 language tags. The text of the standard has been largely rewritten in a clearer, more modern style with far more examples, and with many ambiguities cleared up.

Changes to the data model are relatively minor. A few that particularly caught my attention were a new NO tag to record the absence of an event, for example to say someone was unmarried; a new SDATE tag to record an indicative date for sorting purposes; the ability to attach sources to inline NOTEs and include HTML in them; a new CREA tag for the record creation date; and a new EXID to attach URLs and other IDs to records. This is not an exhaustive list of changes.

Arguably the most important change is the new SCHMA tag, which serves as a point for documenting extensions to GEDCOM. This tag may be familiar if you had been following our work on ELF, as it formed a key element of that. GEDCOM’s SCHMA tag is less developed than ELF’s, but this should not be a problem as, like any other GEDCOM structure, it is extensible.

I know from the correspondence I’ve seen that some people are disappointed that there are not more new facilities in FamilySearch GEDCOM 7, but that is not the point of this standard. As we planned for ELF 1.0, its main accomplishment is in providing a suitable platform for future development, whether by FamilySearch, FHISO or third parties. Perhaps most importantly, it shows a welcome renewed commitment to and investment in GEDCOM by FamilySearch. This FHISO Board of Directors welcome this effort and would like to congratulate FamilySearch on the
release of FamilySearch GEDCOM 7.

Where does this leave our work on ELF? Portions of our work, like the ELF data model, are no longer needed as they have been incorporated into FamilySearch GEDCOM 7, but several items remain:

• We are in the process of defining a generic syntax for GEDCOM irrespective of specification version, and using that to define a GEDCOM media type and register it with the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).
• Continuing to refine the schema idea that FHISO contributed to FamilySearch GEDCOM 7, showing how to back-port it to GEDCOM 5.5.1 and developing a way to add more information, such as payload types, cardinality and the like.
• Developing standards for discovery mechanisms with content negotiation for the URIs registered in the schemas.

We congratulate FamilySearch on this new version of their standard! We plan to discuss the above items about ELF and other topics related to GEDCOM in our next annual general meeting of the FHISO membership.

Due to disruptions caused by changing schedules and reductions in free time during the COVID-19 pandemic, FHISO mostly suspended operations from April 2020 through March 2021. As such, an annual report for 2020 was not produced and all memberships have been extended by a year. We are happy to report that FHISO is operating once again and are hopeful 2021 will prove to be a much more productive year.

The FHISO Board of Directors have prepared a report on our activities in 2019, and our plans for this year. We have also published our accounts for 2019. If you’d like to comment on this report, feel free to email the Board or the Technical Standing Committee.

The call for nominations to the Board of Directors resulted in six nominations for six posts so, per our by-laws, per our by-laws, all six candidates were declared elected without a vote. We are pleased to welcome Joel Cannon, David Mann and Seth Taplin who are joining the board for the first time. They have been elected as Directors at Large, meaning their particular areas of responsibility will be decided at our September board meeting.

Of the previous board, Roger Moffat, Richard Smith and Luther Tychonievich have been re-elected. Luther, who took over as Chair of FHISO in May, continues in this role, while Roger remains Secretary and Treasurer, and Richard takes over from Luther as Technical Coordinator. We say goodbye to Andy Hatchett, Greg Lamberson, Brett McPhee, Tony Proctor and Drew Smith, who are leaving the board. We take this opportunity to thank them for serving on the board for many years, and wish them the best for the future.