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

Creating a standards team

[kruetz]

Well, you may want to have representatives from both industry and academia (where applicable). When choosing representatives from the industry, you want people who are technically on-the-ball and you'll also want people who are more politically-minded (nasty but also handy) to warn you of issues such as "company X won't adopt this unless you include one of their proprietary extensions Y" and the like.

You'll also want to make sure that you select people from a range of companies to whom the standard will be relevant - even a government representative might be a good idea if there's potential for the government to get involved later on. Nothing says 'standard' like having a standards team consisting of people entirely from your company (i won't nod to MS here - other posters can do that for me)

When selecting people from academia, choose people who have been researching this topic or something similar (where possible), but also look out for academics who may not have expertise in this exact area, but have worked on standards teams before. Hell, that's probably a good quality to have in your industry representatives as well.

You'll also need at least one technically-competent lawyer (the better they know the technology and the relevant legal issues, the better).

And you may want to have one or two overseas people in on it, too, to let you know whether or not your ideas are perhaps US-centric and may be changed to becomre more acceptable worldwide.

Well, that pretty much covers my ideas on who should be included. As for your other questions, IHNAOASG (I Have Never Actually Organised A Standards Group), so I don't have any relevant experience and I don't have many other ideas. But I would suggest that a majority vote on all features/points/whatevers would probably be the best way to form a standard.

Best of luck!

Not much of a standard then...

[Big Sean O]

vote on everything, just have the majority win (as opposed to unanimous, otherwise nothing would get done

In this manner you could end up alienating just under 1/2 of your standards group with any decision. Over multiple decisions, you'll end up with NOONE 100% happy.

Achieving 100% concensus on a standards is a pipe dream, but there is great power in adopting a standard that EVERYONE buys off on. Standards that are limited in scope, but have total approval, stand a much better chance of becoming an actual standard.

Remember, flags are also called "standards". Flags are usually created to represent a group that shares a common loyalty. It is convenient to think of a standard as a flag. If you tempt people's loyalty by creating a standard that doesn't have wide approval, there won't be much of a 'rally round the flag', and your standard is not very.