In January, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on SSO Governance and the rules of standardization (Event page here). The benefits of diversity were stressed by Oliver Bell and Ajit Jaokar who pointed to the fact that diversified organizations can fill gaps in the SSO market, which is done by e.g. the Open Web Foundation. No standard developed by any given organization can be said to have any immediate intrinsic value, thus a flexible and agile SSO ecosystem offers means to guarantee that market needs are fulfilled.

Anne Layne-Farrar discussed the implications that arise from government intervention into SSOs’ governance models. There needs to be a trade-off made between the degree of openness and consensus and the speed of the standardization process. Government mandates would simply ignore today’s diversity in an attempt to provide a one-size-fits all solution.

This conclusion was further highlighted in an exclusive interview with Per Andersen, who had performed a study attempting to rank SSOs based on certain criteria of openness. Since there is no unambiguous definition of “open”, different SSOs simply display various nuances of openness. Andersen also pointed to the rare success of government involvement based on political strategy, market dynamics are much better tools for governments to use in order to reach their goals.

Peter Brown, OASIS Board Chairman, provided in an interview valuable insights into actual SSO governance. Brown stressed that market success of any organization is based on confidence, which in the case of OASIS has been achieved through transparency policies. There have been no governmental attempts to influence the governance model of OASIS, and Brown believed that any such attempts in the future would go unanswered.