Over the past six months since April Connect 2026, the GKS Work Stream has welcomed three new product groups from the Large-Scale Genomics Work Stream: the Whole Genome Sequencing Quality Control Standards (WGS-QC), File Formats (representing SAM/BAM/CRAM, VCF and BED), and Future of VCF. Meanwhile, the longer-standing GKS product teams for Variation Representation Specification (VRS), Categorical Variation Representation Specification(Cat-VRS), and Variant Annotation Specification (VA-Spec) are coordinating efforts under the shared banner of the Genomic Knowledge Model (GKM), reflecting the high degree of integration between these products.

In this recurring GKS Work Stream session, we review recent progress, present the roadmap ahead, and open the floor for community priorities for each of the GKS products. This session will feature a presentation on WGS-QC, an interactive discussion on the GKM roadmap, and a presentation and interactive discussion on overall GKS activities and objectives. Within these discussions, we will touch upon a challenge that every standards product shares: implementation resources are always scarce. We suspect that this challenge is common across every Work Stream. We will share the approaches that have worked for us to ease the barriers towards implementer engagement, including hackathons and think tanks, registered implementer communication, and Open House webinars. We will talk about distinct approaches taken by long-standing GKS product teams and also those used by product teams entering GKS from the Large-Scale Genomics Work Stream. We also welcome input on what has worked for products of other GA4GH Work Streams, and invite product teams across GA4GH to share their perspectives.