To efficiently deal with societal, environmental and economic challenges in our increasingly complex world, current and accurate geospatial information is a very important aspect. One key factor in making geospatial information accessible is standardization. It is the definition of common interfaces and terminology between heterogeneous systems to enable interoperability. Especially in spatial data infrastructures, the ability to share, integrate and apply geospatial information helps to achieve sustainability. It is crucial to understand the underlying organizational and technical aspects of the architecture to make best use of it and build sustainable applications. One technical asset to achieve these goals is the open standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The OGC plays a key role addressing the requirements for interoperability among a broad range of organizations operating across different domains and frontiers. This is valid not only within and across organizations of a country, but also e.g. for cross-border initiatives. Only a well-run global consensus standards process can provide the platform that can make such information ubiquitous in mainstream information processing. The presentation will give a brief introduction about the OGC (why interoperability is important, what are the benefits of using open standards), its processes and how interested people from the region can participate. Additionally it will summarize the outcome of the last OGC Technical Committee meeting that took place in June 2012.