Open Comments, hosted by The Open Group
Welcome to Open Comments hosted by The Open Group*, where we’ll discuss things openly with our guests from a variety of backgrounds and from different walks of life. Through this podcast, we hope to give you an inside look into a variety of topics with an equal mix of humor and candor.
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Host: Ash – CDMP – Certified Copywriter (CMP) – CDMA – Certified Proofreader and Editor (CMP), Content Marketing Manager, joined The Open Group in 2020, initially working in the Certification Team as a Certification Services Agent, before moving into the Marketing Team where he now works on marketing collateral, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and produces/hosts The Open Group, Open Comments Podcast.
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Open Comments, hosted by The Open Group
Open Comments S2: Ep. 12 - The Open Group OSDU® Forum and Beyond with Stef Jacobs
The energy data world is racing toward a milestone that promises less friction and more progress: a vendor-neutral foundation that operators, cloud providers, and innovators can all trust. We invited Stef Jacobs, Chair of The Open Group OSDU® Forum, to unpack the plan to make that real by 2026 and what it means for seismic interpretation, AI readiness, and day-to-day workflows.
We start with purpose—why a reference platform matters—and move into concrete takeaways from The Open Group Houston Summit (November 2025): a community implementation that encodes the standard, a data model designed to support seismic interpretation workflows, and the first steps toward certification. Stef explains the “Journey to Venus,” a landing point where the community delivers a neutral, coded reference that vendors can verify against and innovators can build on without lock‑in. The theme is balance: protect the open standard while encouraging a thriving ecosystem on top.
Governance and execution anchor the story. Stef shares how OKRs align a global community to enterprise-grade outcomes, using a practical example of targeting specific workflows to drive measurable progress. We explore how operators will feel the impact in real terms—cleaner interoperability, smoother AI and machine learning pipelines, and faster path from data to decisions. We also confront the hard part: sustaining the standard, keeping the community implementation evergreen, and operating a credible certification program that boosts trust without stifling innovation.
If you are interested in interoperability, seismic-ready data models, cloud-native adoption, and AI at scale in subsurface domains, this conversation lays out the why and the how. You’ll walk away with a clear picture of what 2026 delivers, why it’s pivotal, and how to get involved through focused working groups and upcoming face‑to‑face sessions.
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Hello and welcome back to Open Comments with me Ash. Today's guest is Steph Jacobs, OSDU Forum Chair. Thank you, Steph, for joining us today for this episode to talk to us about the OSD Forum and beyond. To start, please can you introduce yourself to all our listeners, including your full role and what you do? Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, Ash. Happy to do so. My name is Steph Jacobs, and as of September 1st, I have been elected as the OGU Forum Chair. I'm of course working for one of the OGU forum members, and in my case, that's Shell. And at Shell, I am part of the uh overall OGU program which actually applies the OGU platform within Shell to its business, subsurface business. I've been at Shell for the past 13 years and I've spent uh 20 years in my industry, in my career in the industry, in the oil and gas industry.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Now to start, please can you describe the OSGU forum and its mission and vision within the Open Group and the broader energy data ecosystem?
SPEAKER_01:Thanks, Ash. That's a great question. We just revisited the purpose, vision, and mission statement for the OSGU forum. What we see is that the purpose for OSDU forum is to deliver an open source standard and a vendor-neutral data reference platform that supports the energy industry. It provides the foundation for interoperability and with that empowers innovation and efficiency and data-driven decision making across the entire value chain for the OGU for oil and gas and the energy companies. It also enables advanced analytics and AI capabilities.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. Now moving on to reflecting on the Open Group Houston Summit 2025. What were some of your biggest takeaways from the summit?
SPEAKER_01:For me, the biggest takeaway was that we as an OSU community now have alignment on what has to be delivered in the OSU as part of the OSU forum in 2026. In 2026, we need to deliver the community implementation that is the coded version of our data standard, and that's also a neutral reference implementation and a basis for certification. Additionally, the data modeling group has to support the seismic interpretation workflows, and we have to take a first step on certification based on our standard. So those three elements that we have to deliver in 2026 and that we have the alignment on that is are for me the key takeaways from the uh Houston Summit.
SPEAKER_00:And was there a moment, demo, or conversation from the summit that really captured the momentum of the OSD forum community?
SPEAKER_01:I think there has always been momentum within the OGU forum community. What you see at the member presentation is that the OGU Data Foundation is real. Operators are using the OGU Foundation in day-to-day workflows, running their uh service and wells uh applications on the OGU for on the OGU platform and actually are extracting value from it. Over the next few years, what we'll see is more and more of the use cases being shared, showcasing the maturity of our data platform and also the ecosystem uh maturing further.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. And moving on to the roadmap to 2026, when you look ahead to the OSG roadmap, what are the top three areas of focus that excite you the most?
SPEAKER_01:The the roadmap in all right, the thing that excites me most is that I think in 2026 things will really become mature and robust. With the delivery of the community implementation, with the delivery of the data model that supports the seismic interpretation workflow, and with the delivery of self-certification, we will actually mature ourselves from a from a startup to a sustainable organization, which can run provide the foundation, data foundations for the subsurface and walls workflow for the next five to ten years to come. While becoming uh a kind of robust organization, might not sound exciting, but it will be the an exciting step that will that will provide the foundation for the ecosystem going forward.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. And how will these roadmap priorities impact operators in practical terms?
SPEAKER_01:The operators will really be able to use the data that it is stored in an inoperable matter in the OGU foundation in their day-to-day workflows. And that is really where for the operator the money is. By being able to actually more effectively run the digital workflows by applying AI and machine learning work machine learning workflows on top of the interpol, it will become almost like a mute point. So the in 2026 we will get to a point where the using Ozu will always become um indispensable. The organization will be able to not run their effective AI machine learning workflows for the subsurface without the Ozu foundation underneath it.
SPEAKER_00:And what challenges do you anticipate the community must overcome to execute successfully on the 2026 roadmap?
SPEAKER_01:Over the past years, the OSU forum has built a wide range of capabilities and foundations that set ourselves up to become that data foundation for the subsurface world. One of the key challenges that we now need to overcome is that we need to find a way to run that foundation and keep that foundation evergreen that the that the whole industry can run on top of that. So setting up an organization to sustain the standard, to sustain the community implementation, and to sustain the certification processes will be the key thing that we need to solve in 2026.
SPEAKER_00:Now, as we switch gears to the journey to Venus, can you explain the journey to Venus and how it connects to the OSDU forum?
SPEAKER_01:So the journey to Venus is a stage where the OSU forum delivers that vendor neutral platform to the industry. And so by delivering the community implementation, what we do is that we land on Venus. We have that reference platform that is the coded version of our standard. It is the reference implementation against which cloud providers can confirm or verify their products, their hyper-skilled products that are selling to the um to the oil and gas uh operators, and it also is uh the a version that is can innovators can use to develop new innovations on top of without having to use a hyper-skilled version. So Venus sets us up to become the standard which can be referenced and on which we can run our innovation.
SPEAKER_00:And what lessons from the journey to Venus are most relevant to organizations adopting the OSDU data platform or moving toward standardized cloud native data platforms?
SPEAKER_01:I think that the journey to Venus showed us how we splits between the commercial ecosystem and what we deliver as the an OGU forum. We as OGU forum provide a foundation, and we should be very careful not to try to move into the innovation space and into the workflow space. We are the reference. So the by having a reference that is independent from different cloud providers and different application providers, you really create an openness that allows you to drive innovation forward, forward. At the same time, we need to also allow the ecosystem, the application vendors, and the cloud service providers to build their innovation on top of that. So for me, getting that balance between what is the reference, what is the standard, what is that open, that industry new industry standard versus what do you do in the ecosystem. That's for me the key learning that we have learned in the past two years, and which the people commencing on this journey should be very aware of.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. And moving on to OKRs governance and community alignment. You've mentioned before that the OSD forum increasingly uses OKRs to align community efforts. Why was this approach adopted?
SPEAKER_01:It's a good question, Ash. For me to describe why we need the OKRs, I typically use an analogy. I live in uh in a little village just west of Delft, a little a city in the Netherlands. And if I uh would volunteer for the local soccer club there, the amateurs, uh the volunteering would be quite easy. If I I offer to cut the grass every Saturday morning, uh they they're happy to take my help, and uh as uh and they'll they'll uh as they'll they'll accept the uh my uh my efforts to actually contribute to the uh to that amateur soccer club in uh in in the little little village of Denhoorn. If you then think about a professional soccer club in the Netherlands like AyOX or IJs Le Feenoord, if I would volunteer for that organization to cut the grass, the professional soccer organization or founder AJOX will actually raise quite a few requirements. They'll ask me whether when I cut the grass on Saturday morning, whether I'm absolutely sure that I can actually cut the grass every uh Saturday morning, whether I will actually meet their standards of the Dutch Premier League to cut the length of the grass to a particular length. They will check, ask me the question whether the equipment that I'll use uh won't damage the soil underneath it, and so on and so on. So what you see is that there's a difference in volunteering depending on the professionalization, the professionality of the organization that you're volunteering for. And as an OCU firm, we are providing our data foundation for very large corporations in the oil and gas industry, and therefore the the we need to raise the bar on the requirements and the how what kind of contributions we get from the forum members, and the OKRs help us to define where we want to go as an organization, and therefore also to help us to define the requirements of the contributions that we're having. So by setting OKRs as long-term ambitions, we set out what we want to achieve as an organization, and with that also our um our ambitions for our contributions. So it is really about setting a direction for the forum long term and driving and focusing the forum to the right contributions and focus that we need to have.
SPEAKER_00:And can you walk us through an example of an OKR the OC forum has used and how it shaped priorities or delivered measurable outcomes?
SPEAKER_01:A good example of an OKR will be the um the delivery of workflows. So one OKR is that as OGU forum, we want to be able to support first one but ultimately uh four, five, ten workflows in the subsurface domain. If you go after that OKR, it means that you need to exactly know what that workflow is. And in this case, our first priority in the OZU form is the delivery of the data foundations and the data modeling and the community implementations supporting the seismic interpretation workflow. If you know that you want to support the seismic interpretation workflow, you define the workflow and then analyze what gaps you have looking at the current capabilities of the OSU form. And when you then look at those capabilities that you're missing, what you then can do is that you can actually define how you solve those gaps. So by picking that the OKR that we need to start supporting specific workflows in the oil and gas industry, and then start designing and and implementing the process to actually support that, we are actually driving measurable outcomes for the forum.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect. Now, before we close this episode, for someone listening who wants to get more involved in the OSDU community, what's the best first step for them to take?
SPEAKER_01:The OSU community is a community where everybody contributes to the thing that they do best. And so for somebody to get involved in the community after they have become a member of the OSU group is to actually join a working group that is close to their heart. If you are uh passionate about communications, or if you're passionate about data definitions, join the working group and start working within the working group. So and contributing to data definitions, so get involved. So it is all about finding that niche where you're able to contribute to the forum uh with your specific skills and your specific passion, and then uh get more and more involved and start driving there.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. And what's the one message you want listeners to take away about where the OSD forum is heading and why 2026 is such an important year?
SPEAKER_01:2026 is a pivotal year for the OSU forum. We are moving from uh a startup to a sustained operation. We are finalizing a number of our foundations, a first version of the standard, a first version of landing at Venus with the community implementation, and starting our certification process. Once we get there, we will start to sustain those capabilities in the forum and provide the data foundation that oil and gas needs to run their day-to-day workflows and also deliver the innovation that is needed for the efficiency to make the oil and gas company competitive in the longer in the long run.
SPEAKER_00:And are there any events coming up next year that you would encourage people to attend to find out more about the OSG Forum and the data platform?
SPEAKER_01:The big events that of course is is driving the forward forward are the half-yearly face-to-faces. In April 2026, we'll move meet in Oslo, and in Oslo we will check in where we are on this journey towards Venus and towards the delivery of the data standard, and then make our plans for the next year. It is also a perfect place to contribute in person to the working groups that we have in the open in the OSU forum. So it is always a great energy energetic event where you can actually meet the people that you have been working with over the past year, half year, and I always look forward to meet all the whole community there.
SPEAKER_00:That's great. And thank you once again, Steph, for joining us today on Open Comments. It's been really good discussing the OSU forum, and we look forward to seeing the forum continually evolve into 2026 and beyond. And to all our listeners, our open comments community, thank you for tuning into this episode. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we have and look forward to bringing more episodes just like this one into the fold very soon. Until next time, stay safe and happy listening.
