RDA Brokering governance working group March 9, 2015, San Diego.
Notes from meeting and WEBEX recording. Editor, Francoise Pearlman.
Stefano Nativi and Jay Pearlman chaired the session.
Stefano was the master of ceremonies. He first requested that everyone register on line for the session. There were approximately 20 attendees (see attendees list below).
Stefano reviewed the working group agenda:
Brief introduction – a few words about brokering for new attendees;
Panel with 2 remotely joining participants to address business models;
Discussion of the 2 other challenges/work packages;
Status of Working Group activities and key milestones;
Any Other Business.
All participants were asked to introduce themselves:
Around the room participant introductions:
Stefano Nativi, CNR, working for 10 years on GEO and other European projects, cochair of working group;
Jay Pearlman co-pi on Bcube and co-chair of working group;
Rebecca Koskela, Data-one;
Francoise Pearlman, BCube;
Wim Hugo WDS;
Michael Diepenbrock, Pangea;
Rudi Hussar, Washington University;
Simon Cox, CSIRO;
Siri Jodha Khalsa, NSIDC, BCube PI;
Mattia Santoro, CNR;
Hannah Wilcox, NSIDC;
Fabrizio Papesci, CNR;
Helen Glaves, BGS;
Sue Fyfe, Geosciences Australia;
Don Middleton, NCAR;
Hans-Peter Plag, ODU;
Bridget Almas, RDA TAB;
Lynn Yarney, NSIDC;
Phil Journeau, Discinnet Labs’
?, GEO secretariat.
Remote participants:
Doug Ericson – he has 25 years in the tech industry; he is now at VIVO (an education
SW company based in London, Sydney, and Santa Cruz); he previously worked at sasa, sugarcrm, and webex (from early on to the acquisition).
Andrew Fiddle –is at automat, the company which makes wordpress.com & other tools for publishing; he leads a customer support team of 100 engineers.

Panel discussion followed to answer the following question: how can we maintain and govern middleware, which is needed to manage data. As we move to an open source environment, and need to sustain the project long term, what are the options? The 2 panelists have complementary experience, with Doug Ericson focusing on business creation/building and Andrew involved with customer support and operations. Each panelist was asked to talk for approximately 10 minutes.
Stefano showed one slide with each panelist background.
Doug Ericson – he has no formal presentation. He addresses successes and challenges with the Software companies he has worked at over a number of years.
At Webex, initially, they were in the last position among their competitors at the market place. However, they were first to establish themselves, offering software as a service (SAS). They created business applications that could live in the cloud; it worked slowly. Their main competitor was acquired by Microsoft. At that time, everyone was concerned that they would be unable to compete. But they focused on small (1 to 1 or 1 to few) teleconferences, while others worked on the large webinars market. They worked on their own network so that we were not dependant on the public infrastructure. Two years ago, WEBEX had a 68% market share when acquired by Cisco.
At Sugar, they were last to the market place for CRM, but it did catch on. They competed by creating something unique - offering an open source model, which was unusual for that particular market. They were able to grow using open source, when compared with competitors. With open source, the SW publishing model becomes distributed; rapidly accelerating software development. Eighty different language packs were developed over 18 months. It is important to create value for other people such as your partners. He gave the encyclopedia business as another example, comparing Microsoft and Wikipedia; Microsoft, although they spent a lot of money are not mentioned anymore in the encyclopedia business. Wikipedia is a non-profit which requests donations for 1 month a year – they are able to collect
$50 Million over the first few days.
Questions/Answers:
Q How did you achieve localization of the software?
A They developed an API tool kit; also partners localized the help (providing added value for their region)
Q Did you have people contribute without being remunerated?
A They had a combination of 2 models: a free open source model and a commercial model. Anyone can contribute to the open source model. People develop material and can release it for free and give back to the community. This allows participants to feed the market place, then charge for customization services; eventually 15 to
20% transition to the commercial version.
Q What is the size of SUGAR – the home company?
A It is still a private company; when Doug joined the organization, there were approximately 60 people at sugar, and about $6Million revenue. The free version

seeded the market place. Initially, the business grew from direct sales, and through channel partners; they were a $100Million company 2 years ago and made 80% of their business through partners; they had up to 300 people. Because of the organization, there is no need for HR and financial branch.
Q Did they encounter any success regarding public/private partnerships?
A They did see that in Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Thailand. The local governments wanted to enable small businesses. The governments created programs to subsidize the purchase of business applications. They paid up to $15K per year for 2 years to help.
Andrew Fiddle opened his presentation by indicating that there is quite a bit of overlap between his experience and Doug’s. Wordpress was not even in the market initially. You do not have to be 1 st to succeed. Anyone can tranlate Wordpress anywhere; all contributions are meaningful; this creates evangelists in local communities; they were able to grow the platform with no marketing. The company has about 300 people, but only 6 or 7 business people. Their model supports open source projects as well as providing turn key hosted option for people; the turn key model is the same for everyone thus they have one software set and one infrastructure, they can scale things fluidly. On the support side, they organize a community of events around Wordpress . Word camps are accessible and cheap and focus on how to use the open source project, providing peer-to-peer support. Having an open source as well as corporate platform allows things to flow both ways.
Software is beta tested on wordpress.com, before releasing on the free side.
Questions/Answers:
Q Your main message is dual life (free and commercial); do you see any change in the cloud approach?
A – Wordpress only has one license; if someone makes changes and redistributes publicly, they must use the same license. Regarding cloud services, strategically hosting as a service is less of a distinguishing factor, but rather how the hosting is handling computational or labor intensive work; he notes that they are behind re mobile applications.
A _ Doug agrees. Now the focus is on how to make your applications mobily diverse; how about computationally performance; as of 2 years ago 60 to 70% of the customers were interested in cloud solutions.
In conclusion to the panel, Stefano Nativi stressed that many of the projects from
RDA participants are funded with public money. How we can move to a mix of solutions; he closes this part of the meeting and return to the agenda. He gives a few slides on the brokering concept (see charts), and then addresses each of the 3 work packages (business model, agreements, and use cases/adopters), and introduces the leads/co-leads for the agreement (Rebecca Kostela), and use case (Erin Robinson and Mattia Santoro) work packages. He briefly mentions the Hack-a-Thon, which he considers as part of the third work packages; He noted that ICSU/WDS is interested in other hack-a-Thon to test interoperability between brokers. There was more

discussion on sustainability. Michael Diepenbock and Wim Hugo ask: if the semicommercial model fails, can the government step in?
There is a challenge when the framework does not belong to either the provider or the user.