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 benefits from diversity and the risks of government intervention were at the center of the discussion during TalkStandards’ open forum on the issue of SSO Governance on January 28, 2010.

Oliver Bell (Reforming the Reformist Agenda) highlighted the benefits associated with a range of diversified SSOs.
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This interview with Per Andersen, Managing Director of IDC Nordic & Benelux, was conducted for Talkstandards.com via email during January 2010 in the lead up to the Open Forum on SSO Governance.

A major theme of the interview was his 2008 report titled the “Evaluation of Ten Standard Setting Organizations with Regard to Open Standards” (full pdf here). The report, that was commission by the Danish Government, seeks to evaluate and compare the openness of 10 Standards Setting organizations. A summary of the report can be found here.

Other topics addressed during the interview are SSO Governance, Open Standards as well as the role of government in the standards setting process.
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On 2 June 2006, the Danish parliament (the Folketing) unanimously adopted Parliamentary Resolution B103 on the use of open standards for software in the public sector. The Resolution instructs the Government to ensure that the public sector’s use of information technology, including the use of software, should be based on open standards.
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