AGM Held 25 September 2021 at 2100UTC

The 2021 FHISO AGM was held on Saturday 25 September 2021 at 2100UTV. It was held by Zoom Meeting.

Present: Luther Tychonievich — Chair; Roger Moffat — Secretary, Treasurer & Membership Coordinator; and Seth Taplin — Vice Chair & Technical Coordinator, Pierre Clouthier, Charlie Mullenweg, Andy Hatchett, Tony Proctor, and Paul Yelk.

  1. Finances: 
    1. PayPal Balance at 25 September 2021 = $626.01
  2. AGM
    1. Luther started the meeting at 5pm EDT (2100UTC), and asked if anyone objected to the meeting video being recorded – no objections.
    2. Luther introduced current Board Members Seth Taplin and Roger Moffat
    3. Luther recognised two former Board Members Andy Hatchett and Tony Proctor.
    4. Luther reveiwed the history of FHISO from the beginnings of BetterGEDCOM to FHISO’s input with the new GEDCOM 7 released by FamilySearch.
    5. FHISO – where do we want to go – there are 5 paths:
      1. Continue with the FamilySearch GEDCOM team
      2. Accept GEDCOM 7 as a FHISO standard
      3. Accept GEDCOM 5.5.1 as a FHISO standard
      4. Vendors are requesting a citation standard
      5. Finish up ELF
      6. Adding extensions to GEDCOM X for companies interacting with FamilySearch via GEDCOM X
    6. The meeting concluded with comments from the group in the form of a Q & A session.
      1. Q re Status of ELF
        A: it work-in-progress, and may be suspended now that GEDCOM 7 is released
      2. Q about software produced by FHISO
        A: as standards body, software is not our primary output
      3. Q about FHISO’s relationships with specific companies
        A: we have spoken with all of those listed, but do not have a formal relationship with them
      4. Opinion we should focus on citation standards
      5. Second opinion we should focus on citation standards
      6. Q re FHISO’s work on semantic-marked rich text narrative
        A: have discussed, but not on the short-term priority list
      7. Comment that some of FHISO’s ideas were proposed for GEDCOM 7 but didn’t make the published version
      8. Q re Unicode and other character sets
        A: most current standards already support this properly; so far as we know the remaining problems are in implementation, not standards
      9. Q if we are still considering both key-element set citations and semantic-markup citations
        A: yes, and additional models with layers and provenance are also being discussed
      10. Expression of gratitude to the board for continuing this work
  3. Conclusion
    1. The meeting ended at 5:43pm EDT (2143UTC)