The notion of creating standards for standards setting organizations not a new one, but it certainly has attracted more discussion and interest over the past 18 months. The challenge I see with this movement is less in coming up with the types of broad criteria that would be helpful to individual participants in the standards setting ecosystem, there are a host of useful research projects that have done just that over the years. Instead, my concern is related to the idea that there is a single exhaustive set of criteria and moreover a single formula through which those criteria can be passed to create an assessment or comparison of SSOs. Moreover, whatever a systematic or formulaic process such as this might inform us about the SSO itself, I am concerned that it doesn’t guarantee anything with respect to several of the key attributes of individual standards themselves, namely that they be of high quality, relevant and most importantly that they obtain market acceptance.
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The British Standards Institution (BSI) announced in a 2009 press release in a that work had begun to formulate the PAS 98 “Code of practice for the establishment and management of Consortia”, a good practice guide. The code is to be internationally applicable and provide support for consortia in e.g. standards development and interoperability.
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