Open Interconnect Consortium to Sport Three Elite Membership Tiers, Bylaws Say

The consortium has said it will target interoperability in PCs, smartphones, tablets, home appliances and “new wearable form factors” by establishing a specification, an open source implementation and a certification program for wirelessly connecting devices, with the first open source code targeting smart home and office solutions. To be kept apprised of future consortium developments, we submitted our contact information last month at the consortium’s website (http://bit.ly/TQ1D3X). The consortium responded Tuesday with an email inviting us to apply for an individual membership by signing the attached membership and non-disclosure agreements (NDA). Also attached were the consortium’s bylaws and a statement of its intellectual property rights policy.

The email also was to notify us “of a special face-to-face opportunity to receive additional details” on the consortium and to “understand how best to become a member and contribute to the genesis of a new ecosystem,” said the consortium. Organized by Intel, the “F2F” meeting begins Thursday at 1 p.m. at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and is expected to wrap up around 2 p.m. Friday, it said. Anyone who wants to attend must have “in place” either the signed membership agreement or the NDA, it said.

There’s no fee for an individual membership, which runs “on a year-to-year basis, expiring on the 365th day from the date of acceptance of this application,” the agreement said. It for the first time identified Reen Presnell, of Beaverton, Oregon, as the consortium’s first executive director. Presnell is president of the VTM Group, a consulting firm that specializes in marketing and other support services for industry associations and trade groups, mostly in the technology sector, the company’s website said (http://bit.ly/1pH1xcu).

The bylaws show that the consortium plans to create a network of “work groups” and “task groups” that seems similar in structure to that of other groups, such as the “technology groups” and “specialist groups” at the Advanced TV Systems Committee trying to formulate standards for the next-generation ATSC 3.0 broadcast system. Any Diamond or Platinum member in the consortium may propose to the board establishing one or more work groups, the bylaws said. Each work group will be chaired by the employee of a Diamond or Platinum member, though employees of Gold members and individual members may also join, they said. A work group may “charter” a task group, whose chairperson will be from a Diamond or Platinum member, they said. Membership in a task group is open to anyone in the work group that chartered it, they said.

Strict confidentiality rules will bar members from making public disclosures about consortium deliberations, the bylaws said, as is typical of other groups like the Blu-ray Disc Association. The group’s stated antitrust precautions also are standard procedure. All members are “committed to fostering competition in the development of new products and services, and the work of the Corporation is intended to promote such competition,” the bylaws said. “Each Member further acknowledges that it may compete with the others in various lines of business and that it is therefore imperative that they and their representatives act in a manner which does not violate any applicable state, federal or international antitrust laws or regulations or applicable orders.”