As we head into the holiday season I wanted to take a moment and thank everyone for an exceptional year. The OpenChain Project has accomplished incredible things, from altering the status quo in the tooling landscape (and making it better) through to preparing our first online training course. Too many people to count assisted in this process. However, I wanted to give special thanks and acknowledgement to Mark Gisi, chairperson of the Specification Work Group. This year he lead an effort to conclusively bridge the gap between OpenChain ISO/IEC 5230 and the security domain.
This work was far more than speculative: companies around the world began using our ISO/IEC standard to accomplish security goals, especially in light of recent international developments. The situation was both supported and challenged by the market reality of deployment before full community cohesion. For large companies this is never a serious concern, but for small companies trying to get up-to-speed it is our job (and our pleasure) to make sure they can match their peers, their suppliers and their customers as soon as possible.
Mark took this all in his stride and coordinated a multi-month effort with exceptional consensus to produce our Security Assurance Reference Guide in August. Since that date the guide has been available to all parties for review, and Mark further shepherded feedback from that review to determine if updates were needed in the near term. They were not, because you all hit it out of the ballpark, and we got this artifact to market at precisely the right time to address topics like the US Executive Order.
Mark, thank you.
Now, Mark is far from the only person who has done exceptional things. I want to particularly thank Balakrishna for shepherding our first online training course (with certification) through reviews by many, many parties. We go live on the 16th December, tomorrow, and change the market in that direction. The course, of course, is free. I also want to thank Oliver, who has been running the OpenChain Reference Tooling Work Group on a breathtaking schedule of bi-weekly meetings. The sheer amount of information collected and experience shared eclipses anything done before in that domain. And finally in this list (but not in terms of amazing contribution), I want to thank Max for running the OpenChain Automation Case Study, which took all the ingredients around the world, and showed how to make them turnkey, how to many them work in the supply chain, and how to contextualize it as business intelligence.
Shane Coughlan
OpenChain General Manager
