*** Win an Apple iPad 2 Tablet, an Apple iPod touch or Bose AE2 headphones! ***

The survey is a joint effort by two academic researchers who are OGC members and by the OGC Business Value Committee. Dr. Mu Xia at Santa Clara University and Dr. Kexin Zhao at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte developed the survey based on requirements from the OGC Business Value Committee to support their studies on standards effectiveness. The OGC Business Value Committee will use a summary of the results to help the OGC better understand the value of the OGC’s open standards and improve its programs for geospatial standards development, compliance testing and outreach.

We encourage everyone involved with geospatial or location data, software and services to complete the survey. This is an opportunity for technical and commercial colleagues to work together and highlight their business needs and requirements around open standards.  OGC membership is not a requirement, and you can participate even if the software you use or provide does not implement OGC standards.

The survey takes about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. Individual responses will be seen only by the researchers and OGC staff. The researchers will summarize the data gathered from the survey, removing all references to individual responses, and make the summary available to OGC Business Value Committee members. An executive summary will be provided to survey respondents.

The researchers have prepared two versions of the online survey. To take the survey, if you are a technology user, visit http://uncc.surveyshare.com/s/AQAIJDC. If you are a technology provider (a vendor or a system integrator) or a consultant, visit http://uncc.surveyshare.com/s/AQAIZBC. If you are not sure which version to use, contact us. Please also forward this message to others who might be interested in completing the survey.

The survey period is 1st November through 18th December 2011.

 Prizes will be awarded at random to three individuals who complete the survey. The first person whose name is drawn after the survey has closed will receive an iPad 2 (16GB, WiFi), the second will receive an iPod Touch (8GB, 4th Generation) and the third will receive a set of Bose AE2 headphones.

Thanks for your support!

The members of the OGC Business Value Committee http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/businessvalue

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 430 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC 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 useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.