→ Upcoming Episode: How Standards Emerge: Lessons from STAC

Featuring:	Matt Hanson Jed Sundwall
Date:	10 Dec 2025
Time:	11:00 AM PST

Join us for a conversation with Matt Hanson about how open tech standards evolve, using the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) as a case study. STAC began as a spec for imagery metadata and grew into an interoperable ecosystem built around a common language for describing geospatial information.

We’ll explore how community-driven design and iteration made STAC successful, and how emergent standards enable institutions to align without central control. The conversation draws on the new white paper Emergent Standards: Enabling Collaborations Across Institutions, which traces how small, loosely organized groups developed global standards.

Links!

Emergent Standards: Enabling Collaborations Across Institutions - White paper from the Institutional Architecture Lab
STAC: A Retrospective, Part 2 - Why STAC Was Successful - Matt’s reflection on STAC’s success
STAC Specification - The official STAC spec

→ Episode 3: Inside Harvard's data.gov Archive

Jed talks with Jack Cushman from the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab about their project to archive and preserve more than 311,000 datasets from Data.gov. We explore how they use BagIt for long-term preservation, built a serverless search interface that makes 17.9 TB of data discoverable in the browser, and what this means for the future of online archives.

→ Episode 2: Protomaps and PMTiles

Jed talks with Brandon Liu about Protomaps, PMTiles, and why a compelling base map as a data product matters. We cover open-source, customizable alternatives to Google Maps, how PMTiles enables single-file, static hosting, and practical ergonomics that help developers put maps on the web.

→ Episode 1: Why LLM Progress is Getting Harder

Jed Sundwall and Drew Breunig explore why LLM progress is getting harder by examining the foundational data products that powered AI breakthroughs. They discuss how we’ve consumed the “low-hanging fruit” of internet data and graphics innovations, and what this means for the future of AI development.