Photo: Xavier Häpe
The World Standards Day 2009 conference ‘European Standardisation for the next decade’ organised by the European Commission was also used to publish the issue paper of the EXPRESS group. Several issues were up for debate by expert panels.
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1. The decimal system
2. The latin alphabet
3. English (as a Lingua Franca)
4. Standard time
5. The US Dollar
6. The metric system
7. Internet Protocol
8. GSM
9. HTML
10. SMTP/MIME
It is relatively easy to come up with standards for communication – formal and informal – that facilitates exchange and contributes to the functioning of the global economy in a very fundamental way. It is much harder to identify quality standards with the same widespread use and undisputed global value.
I would like to argue that this pattern is no coincidence. Standards for exchange and communication solves a coordination problem and are typically self-enforcing, i.e. they are unilaterally beneficial to all users. Standards for exchange also lack distributional problems.
World Standards Day is celebrated each year on 14 October to pay tribute to the efforts of thousands of experts worldwide who collaborate within IEC, ISO and ITU to develop voluntary International Standards that facilitate trade, spread knowledge and disseminate technological advances.
In its groundbreaking report published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited technical standards, like those published by the IEC, ISO and ITU, as a means of mitigating climate change now, while offering the potential to reduce its effects in the future as new technologies are developed and mature.
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