Invasive species are a global problem and managing them is inefficient at best. Being able to access data on invasive species globally will: 1) provide information on potential biological invasions, 2) allow access to a wide variety of information on effective management techniques, 3) and enable research on the nature of invasive species at a level that is impossible with isolated databases. There is an existing community of organizations with databases that contain information on invasive species that would be valuable to a much larger audience. Surveys and interviews with these organizations have shown that they have limited resources and technical knowledge to participate in data exchange. At the same time there are few resources available for centralized development and support of this activity. What is needed for the Global Invasive Species Information Network to be successful is a protocol that these organizations can implement with a toolkit that can be easily customized and supported by a very small staff. We have defined a protocol based on a subset of TAPIR and implemented a test system that has shown to be much simpler than existing approaches. This GISIN protocol is very robust and will provide high performance. The next steps will be to begin adding data providers to the network while further refining the system and to develop a design for a toolkit that meets the needs of the invasive species community. For the test system, see http://squall.nrel.colostate.edu/cwis438/websites/GISINDirectory/.