FHISO: One Community, One Standard - Come join us!

The Family History Information Standards Organization, or FHISO, is a newly-formed international organization created to develop standards for the digital representation and sharing of family history and genealogical information. One community, one standard.

FHISO will be a nonprofit, community-owned organization. Members will work transparently and collaboratively to identify, develop and maintain voluntary, open, consensus-based technical standards for international use. FHISO standards will be publicly available at zero or minimal cost on a non-discriminatory basis. Anyone will be able to implement the standards for any purpose without royalty or license fees. I see these as strong positives for our international community.

It was announced in Austin, Texas, and Gilbert, Arizona, today, 29 Oct 2012, that the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) has finalized its plans to become a founding member of the Family History Information Standards Organization, Inc. (FHISO). Drew Smith has been designated as the key organizational member representative of FSG to FHISO as FHISO members from the global genealogical community work together in the development of standards for the digital representation and sharing of family history and genealogical information.

Click on the image, furnished by FHISO, to read the August 15, 2012, press release announcing that WikiTree has joined FHISO as a Founding Member, joining Ancestry.com and RootsMagis, since May, to participate with other to develop standards. WikiTree founder, Chris Whitten, will be the organizational member representative.

On July 27, 2012, FHISO announced that RootsMagic had finalized its plans to become a Founding Member of FHISO. Click on the image, furnished by FHISO, to read the press release.

Mary 17 Press Release:

Press Release: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ancestry.com set to collaborate about community standards

Gilbert, AZ USA—May 17, 2012—Family History Information Standards Organisation, Inc. (FHISO) announced today that Ancestry.com, Inc. has finalized its plans to become a founding member of the organisation. FHISO is a newly-formed international organisation created to develop standards for the digital representation of family history and genealogical information. As a founding member, Ancestry.com will designate five organisational member representatives to participate with other FHISO members from the global genealogical community.

Ancestry.com is the world's largest online family history resource, with 1.9 million paying subscribers. More than 10 billion records have been added to the site in the past 15 years. Ancestry users have created more than 34 million family trees containing approximately 4 billion profiles. In addition to its flagship site, Ancestry.com offers several localized Web sites designed to empower people to discover, preserve and share their family history.

FHISO is a standards-setting organisation bringing the international family history and genealogical community together in a transparent, democratic forum for the purpose of developing information standards to solve today’s interoperability issues. To learn more about FHISO, visit our website, http://fhiso.org/ .

Please join us in welcoming Ancestry.com and their member representatives to FHISO!

CONTACT:

Anthony C. Proctor, FHISO Media Relations (acproctor@fhiso.org)

Robert M. Burkhead, FHISO Acting Chair (rmburkhead@fhiso.org)

Andrew G. Hatchett III, FHISO Acting Secretary (agh3rd@fhiso.org)

The Family History Information Standards Organization, or FHISO, is a newly-formed international organization created to develop standards for the digital representation and sharing of family history and genealogical information. Our mantra is: one community, one standard

We hope you will be. Visit the website to learn more details

Membership will be available to all who participate in the global family history and genealogical community. I will share more about FHISO in future posts. FHISO's success depends on the voluntuary participation of all the global stakeholder groups. In the standard-setting process, there is no substitute for the active involvement of vendors, developers, technologists, users and family history or genealogy organizations. All of us must work together for the common good.

We would like your feedback and comments, below. Thank you.

We will adding modules of more information as the days and weeks go by. Stop by regularly.

The Board of Directors is the organisation's governing body. It establishes FHISO's goals and policies, which are more fully developed and implemented by standing committees. The board manages the organisation, including work to ensure proper funding and compliance with state and federal authorities. The board supports, but does not manage, the work of the operating committees.

Decision-making occurs throughout the process, largely based on a requirements-driven, consensus-building model. Standards established in the FHISO process become published and made publicly available. Following publication, the organisation provides education and other support to encourage adoption and use of the standards.

Are you ready to contribute as an active member?

BetterGEDCOM participants (currently 140+) formed this independent wiki community to define terms that genealogists, family historians and programmers use and to develop data sharing standards that software programs and websites would adopt to provide for seamless data sharing between users, and between users and websites. We invite all to participate in the discussions at BetterGEDCOM, looking forward to the day when all genealogy data can be shared without data loss.

The establishment of FHISO signals neither the replacement nor the end of BetterGEDCOM. FHISO will be the sponsor of the BetterGEDCOM wiki. The future role and function of the wiki will be determined as FHISO further documents its forum requirements.

Does your organization have a Code of Conduct?

Click the link and read carefully this well crafted Code of Conduct for all members of the FHISO community.