Big Day for RETS in Chicago

Aug 9, 2007 Michael Wurzer

There’s a lot of news to report from the RETS meetings in Chicago. First, there were tons of new faces this meeting. Usually, there are around 50-75 participants but there were over 120 this meeting, due to some excellent promotion by Gregg Larson and Matt Cohen, who are heading up the marketing work group. Kristen Carr also has been recruiting other MLSs to attend, and her efforts appear to be paying off well, as many of the new participants were from MLSs.

I’m also pleased to report that the new governance proposal submitted by the governance work group was approved today by the RETS community. In addition, the community voted to have the current governance work group act as an interim board to get the process started. Our first goal is to establish, by September 15, a process for the membership to nominate a slate of potential directors, with the goal of having the slate finalized for the December meeting in Miami.

There were several other motions passed, including the approval of the payloads (data definitions) for person, member, team, participant and office. The approval of these defintions is good validation of the work of the schema work group, being led by Paul Stusiak. The work group has been meeting once a month for the last three months to hash out the details of these data definitions and it’s great to see that hard work validated. It’s amazing how complicated something like team definitions can be, and the work is likely to get more difficult as we turn to listings and property definitions but the objective still is to have those payloads ready for voting at the December meeting in Miami.

The community also voted to open RETS version 1.7 to change proposals, with the aim of creating verison 1.8. This is the result of the vision Mark Lesswing (NAR’s CTO) articulated last spring in Austin to create a family of standards, supporting both the strong progress of RETS 2 while also supporting 1.x. Furthering this goal, the community approved a proposal by Chris McKeever to make clear that the payloads, though previously referred to as RETS 2 schema, really are independent of RETS 2 and could be delivered as part of an existing RETS server, too, or used for any other purpose. The schema provide standard listing definitions and that work can be used in many, many ways, not just as part of RETS 2.

There certainly was much more, but I’m too tired to write more. I’m taking vacation next week, but may write a bit. I’ve got a post stewing about how the switch on the web from anonymity to identity will broadly impact the MLS and MLS systems, and I’d love to be able to get it out soon. The priority next week, though, is going to be relaxing with my family.