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The BSI PAS 98 Code of Practice for Consortia

posted by Mattias Ganslandt on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 4:36 pm

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.

The underlying reason for the PAS is said to be the ever growing importance of speed to market which is believed to lead to continued growth and influence of consortia. BSI expresses that formal National Standards Bodies (NSBs) can add value to this process and the PAS 98 will facilitate this by closing the gap between the two sectors.

The code of practice as well as identifying legal requirements for consortia to follow, makes recommendations regarding:
• “The management structures most appropriate to the governance of the proposed consortium activity;
• the procedures likely to prove most effective for specific activity types;
• the terms and prerequisites applicable to consortium membership;
• the selection and delivery of services that the consortium might provide.”

The draft version of the PAS 98 will be made publicly available shortly (May 2010).

recent DISCUSSION

Daniel Dardailler says:

Will these criteria be public, unencumbered ?
Ken Krechmer says:

As long as we are dealing with commercial organization that need to make a profit, there is some constraint on their activities.

Of course there can be significant problems with consortia. Some consortia form to negotiate IPR among participants. Some consortia form to prevent others from addressing their market. Both these actions may be in restrain of trade. But there can be cases where both these actions are in the long run desirable for the public. That is, when without IRP negotiation no product would be attempted (because costs are not known); or when a market would not develop without significant initial investment.

I think that existing anti-trust rules, if applied would make examples of the most seriousoffenders. The problem I see is that the rules need to recognize that as part of an anti-trust action that relates to programmable interfaces, standards are needed. Neither the EU or USA recognized this in the case of Microsoft.

I doubt that rules for SSOs can accomodate such complexity. To the extent that rules are created that do not fit a specific market need, some consortia will just not use them. So having rules will not be harmful, just not very useful.

The BSI PAS 98 Code of Practice for Consortia

recent DISCUSSION

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Mattias Ganslandt

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