Many of us have experienced the joy (or should I say frustration) of moving ourselves or perhaps our parents out of a house in which an overwhelming amount of stuff has accumulated.  

Collaborative organizations, like GENIVI, that have been around a long time also accumulate a lot of "old stuff".   GENIVI members have had a rich history of delivering many valuable assets to the automotive industry.  These assets range from open source code projects (many of which are still in the github repository) to UML models of standard interfaces to briefs describing technical approaches to known problems to compliance specifications and supporting documentation for the GENIVI compliance program.  Further, artifacts of our many All Member Meetings, Technical Summits, expert group workshops and industry events have also accumulated over the 12 years GENIVI has been in operation.  

I share this for a couple of reasons.  First, not all of this "old GENIVI stuff" has lost its worth. GENIVI has made the decision to preserve these materials in our member wiki, which is different than our "public" wiki, the one you find yourself on right now.  Since GENIVI has moved to a more open model, the public wiki has become the PRIMARY source of CURRENT content and artifacts for active projects within GENIVI.  We don't want any confusion about were to find recent dialog and outputs of current GENIVI activities.  But the "old GENIVI stuff" is still available and with proper member credentials, it can be searched and mined for valuable insights.  The second reason I share this is to remind and re-energize our collaborative community to continue delivering valuable assets to the industry, as GENIVI has consistently done for 12 years.  GENIVI has continuously evolved to embrace innovation in the automotive industry resulting in active projects that are meaningful and relevant.  However, this evolution has resulted in less emphasis on past approaches, programs and outputs (many of which were valuable at the time of delivery) and the accumulation of "stuff" in our member wiki.

One of the most important programs in earlier years of the alliance was the GENIVI Compliance Program (reachable only my members with access credentials).  Automaker RFQs often requested GENIVI Compliant(TM) solutions from their suppliers.  This resulted in an active compliance program in which GENIVI members could measure compliance of their IVI platforms against a GENIVI Platform Compliance Specification.  Those that were successful received the right to use the trademark in their marketing materials and in their RFQ responses.  This led to a rapid increase of adoption by automakers for Linux-based solutions because of a robust ecosystem of solution providers, which was exactly why the compliance program was initially established.  As we survey that same ecosystem today, it is strong and the need for continuing the compliance program has waned as many commercial vendors today offer very mature IVI solutions.  As a result, the GENIVI Board has recently agreed to discontinue the compliance program, as it was defined previously, and to focus the alliance attention on other innovations like multi-OS integration and car to cloud connectivity.

The compliance program is one of many important "old GENIVI" outputs documented in the GENIVI member wiki.  Even though the program is paused, members may still find value today in some of its artifacts and in leveraging GENIVI open source code.  For representatives of member companies, GENIVI welcomes continued usage of the GENIVI member wiki, even though many parts of it are obsolete and not kept up to date.  If your credentials have expired or you have forgotten them, you can contact the GENIVI helpdesk to get them renewed.  And for all of us, let's keep accumulating good artifacts in our current projects as the industry needs collaborative and standard approaches to the challenges faced in today's connected car.  Even if it may eventually become "old stuff", let us keep pace with the speed of technology innovation and not let the future limit our productivity today.      




  • No labels