In 2022, FHISO continued to actively engage with GEDCOM, worked towards a citation standard, and made positive changes to our financial outlook. In our annual general meeting in August we reviewed these operations and received strong support from the members and guests in attendance for continuing our work on supporting GEDCOM and developing citation standards.
Luther Tychonievich served as FHISO’s representative on the GEDCOM Steering Committee in 2022, submitting multiple fixes to 7.0 and proposing multiple updates for 7.1. Much of this work was driven by user requests in the GEDCOM community; however, we continued to represent the interests of open standards and led the effort to define an extension discovery format within the GEDCOM standard, an initial version of which was released on gedcom.io during November 2022.
FHISO’s technical team, led by Seth Taplin, began an in-depth exploration of family history citations. We explored various standards from other disciplines documenting their shortcomings for family history work and explored possible extensions to existing open citation standards and tools to support the needs of family history citations. That extension work ran into some unexpected roadblocks due to difficult-to-modify code and extension challenges so there is not yet a work product to display, but continues to make progress.
A review of FHISO’s finances, led by Roger Moffatt, showed that we were spending roughly half our budget employing legal representation which is no longer needed now that we have completed filing for 501(c)(3) status and resolving other status issues with the US federal government. We thus chose not to renew that relationship, employing instead a registered agent to maintain our legal standing in the state of Arizona, where FHISO is incorporated.
As always, the board would like to thank our members for their ongoing support!