Why are working groups private?

1

Hi,
Is there any reason why the working groups are private and users can’t see the discussions that happen within? It seems unproductive for an open standard such as FIX. Wouldn’t it be better to have as much discussion as possible in the open, on a forum like this? I’m not sure I understand why that would be.

Thanks

  • Filippo Costa
2

FIX is a non-profit organization funded by membership and the ability to join working groups and committees is one of the benefits of this membership. Funding is required to support the infrastructure for the FIX website and the collaboration of working group participants and committee members. Funding is also required to develop and maintain the free and open standards like FIX TagValue, SBE, and FIXP as well as Orchestra, the new meta-data standard for repositories, and the normative specification of the application layer.

However, FIX is also active on GitHub where you will find a number of public projects related to FIX Technical Standards and tools to automate the development and testing of FIX interfaces. You do not have to be a FIX member to participate and can create issues and pull requests.

3

@hanno.klein thank you for your response! I wondered if that was the reason, indeed it is apparently. I get it, maintaining the infrastructure and the community website has a cost which can be amortized only with such incentives for FIX membership.

Thank you again.

4

Is it possible for a student like me, unaffiliated with any specific company, to join the working groups? I am developing open-source implementations and tools for the FIX protocol and staying up to date with the latest FIX-related developments would help me immensely.

5

@neysofu, you did not specify the working group(s) you are interested in. The FIX Program Office will contact you to explain the membership options that we have.

As a developer you are most likely already active on GitHub. Some of the tools and the FIX Technical Standards are public projects in GitHub where you can participate immediately, e.g. https://github.com/FIXTradingCommunity/fix-orchestra. What are you interested in?

6

I’m interested in the Cybersecurity, Orchestra, and High Performance Working Group(s) in particular. Thank you :slight_smile: