Back in 2013, I wrote a short blog post titled “ISO should be an open source project.” In it, I (somewhat offhandedly) argued for a new paradigm for cross-industry collaboration - one in which both individuals and enterprises work together in the open.

Well this week, the 3MF Consortium completed its transition to hosting all of our specifications - as well as sample files, implementations, and much of our internal consortium documentation - on GitHub. Where they can be viewed, downloaded, forked, and pull requested by anyone in the world.

This transition took a considerable amount of work, and maintaining a culture of openness will require maintained effort. But the benefits are significant: Not only will we encourage newcomers to use and improve our work, but we have also streamlined our own workflow (emailing Word docs back and forth is pretty inefficient) and aligned it with the very stakeholders (product managers and software engineers) who implement 3MF specs.

Five years ago, I wrote: “I would *hope* that in ten, fifteen years max I'm seeing these standards in a web browser for free.” I’m proud and thankful to have that hope fulfilled :)