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 […]
Continue reading FamilySearch GEDCOM 7
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 […]
Continue reading Introducing our new board
Most FHISO members will have received an email on Friday about their membership expiring on 31 May 2019, and asking whether they’d like to renew. A lot of our members paid $20 to join FHISO back in 2013 when we first invited people to become members of the organisation. The $20 membership fee was described as an annual fee, but as setting up FHISO took far longer than anticipated, we felt it inappropriate to ask members to pay to renew their membership renewals while we were still establishing the organisation and started technical work in earnest. We therefore extended all memberships free of charge several times, most recently until 31 May 2019.
We now believe FHISO is now fairly well established, and with public drafts of six standard now available, technical work is well under way too. We plan to hold elections to the FHISO Board of Directors towards the end of July, to be […]
Continue reading Membership renewals
The FHISO Board of Directors have prepared a report on our activities in 2018, and our plans and concerns for the future. This is the first time we have prepared a report of this nature, covering all aspects of the organisation, but we intend to produce a report like this annually. We have also published our accounts for 2018. If you’d like to comment on this report, feel free to email the Board or the Technical Standing Committee.
FHISO’s Technical Standing Committee is pleased to announce the first public draft of a new standard, Extended Legacy Format (ELF): Date, Age and Time Microformats, or ELF Dates for short. This draft defines microformats for representing dates, ages and times in arbitrary calendars together with how they are applied to the Gregorian, Julian, French Republican and Hebrew calendars in a GEDCOM-compatible manner. It is available as an HTML web page or as a PDF for download.
We welcome comments these, preferably to the tsc-public mailing list. A longer overview of this draft can be read in the the announcement email.
Merry Christmas from all at FHISO, and we wish you an enjoyable New Year.
The TSC have agreed on a new set of priorities for technical work, which are discussed in more detail in our strategy paper. In preparation for this work, the TSC have drafted a policy on the use of vocabularies. We would welcome discussion of these on the tsc-public mailing list.
The Board and TSC have recognised that FHISO’s by-laws, the TSC charter, and the TSC operations and policy manual were designed with a large organization in mind and are impeding work with the present number of volunteers. We plan to adopt a much less structured, more volunteer-based interim process until our governance structure is overhauled, and technical work towards our priorities will occur in a “committee of the whole” on the tsc-public mailing list.
The minutes of the January board meeting are also now available.
We are pleased to announce that the FHISO Board have approved a Operations and Policy Manual which should help clarify how we envisage the standards development process proceeding. We identify three main phases in the production of a new standards: idea generation, exploratory work, and project development. The manual details how these stages will operate to ensure an open, transparent and inclusive development process.
Idea generation is where we find out from the community what areas they want to see addressed in future standards. It began with the Call for Papers we announced last spring. More recently we set up the tsc-public mailing list for more informal discussion. Even though we are ready to begin exploratory work in certain areas, we welcome new ideas from all interested parties and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Exploratory work will be carried out in a number of exploratory groups (or EGs), each exploring […]
Continue reading The standards development process
The Family History Information Standards Organisation (FHISO) is pleased to announce that its Technical Standing Committee is starting the technical work on a new, open genealogical standard. We are seeking to build an active and diverse community to collaborate in this process, and we encourage FHISO members and non-members alike to participate.
Much of the initial technical work will be carried out in exploratory groups, each focusing on a specific aspect of the FHISO’s standardisation work. For each group, we are looking for members of the FHISO who are willing to commit to active participation. Once a group has enough committed participants and starts work, anyone will be able to join in with that work.
Don’t want to join one of these exploratory groups, but still want to be involved? No problem! We have created the tsc-public mailing list for the discussion of any other technical matter that you believe the FHISO should be interested […]
Continue reading Technical work begins at FHISO
|
|
