Community standards are specifications that are created through informal organization and are then widely adopted by a larger group. The STAC specification and Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs are examples of community specifications that have become de facto standards for geospatial interoperability. This talk will examine how the process of developing community standards differs from traditional standards development and how to drive adoption. Numerous examples of successful community standards will be presented.

In addition, we will provide a case study of a current effort - that of STAPI - a specification for satellite tasking, or more specifically, an API for how users can order data from the future from satellite platforms. We have been spearheading an effort to develop such a specification and after two sprints we presented at the last FOSS4G in Kosovo. This prompted a third sprint in Europe, bringing together an even larger community. Working with government groups, commercial satellite operators, and data integrators, these sprints have worked toward developing a specification as well as implementations for several commercial providers, as well as ordering APIs for public datasets.

This talk will dive into what worked for STAC and other community standards and how we are taking those lessons to develop a standardized way for collecting future geospatial data.