Creating a Standards Team?

bridgeland asks: "What is the best way to create a standards team? Who should be included? How should it be governed? I have been asked by a vendor Cokinetic Systems to start an independent standards body for their presentation layer description language I3ML. I am interested, but I don't want to repeat mistakes already made by others. Any relevant experience?"

Comments

Standards bodies

[Kopretinka]

I suggest you first try to get one of the relevant standards bodies (this could be ECMA, W3C, OASIS, IETF or others) to get this upon them - they would probably create a group, they already have processes to do that.

Should that fail, just look at their processes and learn from them when you're creating your group.

My experience is with W3C, where the process is basically the following (with some rewording):

1. Call for Participation (as public as possible, sent directly to those you think might be interested)
2. Charter (or should that be before the previous step?)
3. Requirements
4. Periodic public drafts
5. Last Call for Comments Draft (gathering as much consensus as possible)
6. Candidate Spec (gathering implementation evidence and comments)
7. Spec

W3C's Proposed Rec is mostly for approval by the Advisory Committee and the director, so this might be unnecessary.

Anyhow, you must consider the current open alternatives (I've notice XUL mentioned in other comments, I don't know the relevance myself) and decide if you want to improve or ratify one of them (based on requirements) or if you want to merge them into something new.