To the question:
• Is a formalized review of SSOs fostering or impeding efficient standardization?
The W3C staff considers that a formalized review of SSOs would foster efficient standardization. We believe that a positive review would help W3C gain additional recognition in the global community for its successes, and that in turn would help W3C earn additional public and private investment in its international efforts.
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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In late 2008, IBM published a new corporate policy, which set guidelines for the company’s behavior in different standards setting organizations. While initially well received, such an attempt to standardize the process of standardization may prove to have negative effects on innovation as no single consensus-view on openness currently exists.
The initiative strives to ultimately increase the level of openness throughout the whole process of standards development and was the result of a six-week discussion in 2008, in which 70 independent experts debated whether modern SSOs manage to keep up with reality (commercial, legal, social etc.). Interestingly, the discussion was not open.
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The crux and, indeed, the most challenging aspect of standards creation is the ability of different standards to promote both competition and innovation. Today there are many different approaches to setting standards, including de facto standards set informally through the market and formal standards established by governments or standard setting organisations (SSOs). There are also standards involving proprietary efforts and those based on collaborative or open efforts.
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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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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.
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In my previous post, I discussed the actuality of Charles Duell’s 1899 statement “Everything that can be invented has been invented” on the basis of reluctances to innovate at the very core of the Internet and the role of overlay networks.
In this post, I try to answer the question: what are the implications for standards by these overlay networks?
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I first saw this initiative at Kim Cameron’s Identity blog where he talks of Microsoft’s announcement at the RSA conference about Minimal Disclosure, End to End trust and Claims based Identity system.
The service has been implemented in Germany in partnership with Fraunhofer FOKUS – who are good friends (I have been invited to speak at FOKUS events for a few years now and I highly recommend it for some cutting edge thinking).
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In the previous part of this blog (read Part 1 HERE), we discussed the Smart Grid vision. In this section, we shall see how the Smart Grid extends to the home network.
It is important to realize that the last mile (the home), can extend to the ‘meter’ OR it can proliferate deeper into every device connected to the home network. As we can imagine, there are already standards for home networks. So, the question is: How does Smart Grids interface to home networks?
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With so much focus on information-based transparency, Sunshine Week is a reminder that many forms of public access to government information are good for democracy.
Data.gov, the public catalog of diverse, high value, machine readable US government datasets is perhaps the best current example of information-based transparency. Recovery.gov has a similar transparency goal, but a different approach. It focuses on one topic, accounting for $787 billion in stimulus funding, by presenting summary level analysis of thousands of quarterly reports from the organizations that received funding.
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