[OGC Press Release] The OGC Announces New Membership Category - Individual Developers to Have a Direct Voice in Standards

[OGC Press Release]

PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For information about this announcement, contact:

Sam Bacharach
Executive Director, Outreach and Community Adoption
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc
tel: +1-703-352-3938
sbacharach at opengeospatial.org

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December 6, 2007 -- Wayland, Mass. -- The Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC®) announces a new category of membership, Individual
Membership. It is designed to provide a direct path for independent
developers to help shape the OGC agenda. Individual Members have
access to all written and electronic Technical Committee (TC)
communications, and may participate in working groups and
subcommittees of the TC, as well as in OGC Interoperability
Initiatives.

Mark Reichardt, president of OGC, said, "OGC recognizes the
ever-increasing importance in today's world of independent
developers working on a range of technology solutions. OGC now has a
mechanism to enable individuals to contribute directly to creation of
new standards and modification of existing ones. We look forward to
their contributions."

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 340
companies, government agencies, research organizations, and
universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly
available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support
interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless
and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower
technology developers to make geospatial information and services
accessible and useful with any application that needs to be
geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at
http://www.opengeospatial.org/.