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?"

the only thing i can think of

[Stinson]

the only real thing i can think of at the moment, is work something to the effect of a democracy, and vote on everything, just have the majority win (as opposed to unanimous, otherwise nothing would get done), but before you vote on anything, throughly discuss it so everyone is on the same page for all sites of the vote.

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.

Re:Not much of a standard then...

[dkf]

Organize yourself as an oligarchy; people should be on the committee because they are believed to be likely to do a creditable job there. I'd advise seeking a 2/3 consensus on whatever you do (while seeking to achieve 100% where possible) as this stops cliques from doing very much unless they have a genuinely good idea, while not letting single hold-outs stall things indefinitely. And listen to the wider community.

We should standardize this...

[MarvinMouse]

I think we should form a standards team to standardize what a standards team is.

The first meeting will be held next week, but first we need to hold a pre-meeting to plan for that meeting.. oh yeah, and just to make sure the pre-meeting goes well, there is a pre-pre-meeting tommorow at the office.

Hopefully this way, we can avoid the waste by standarizing what a standards team should be... But first we need to standarize what as standard team so our standards team isn't non-standardized.

It's brilliant.

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!

Re:Creating a standards team

[sporty]

I'm in total agreement, but to sum up. When making standards, or putting in systems or anything of that sort, you need representatives of all your stake holders. If it's a small project, you need only a few. On larger ones, you need to be more organized.

Sorta like gov't. Except be more effective :)

Ask Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot,

I've been asked by a major semiconductor manufacturer [intel.com] to rebuild their supply chain.

Basically, I need to replace a network of 4,000 heterogenous machines with a single unified bid system, based on the client's platform. Some systems are overseas, so the system will need to transparently support Asian and European standards as well.

All legal requirements for all countries must be met, and all low-level transactions most be logged and retained, both paper and digital, according to ISO standards. Currency conversions, bills of lading, etc., all need to be handled transparently.

All the inventory needs to be tagged with RF IDs, and tracked as it moves from supplier to supplier to the final client. This has to be integrated into the platform directly, and accessible through RF-aware handhelds.

And I need to have this ready in three weeks.

I've been playing with some Perl scripts and I think something called "XLM" (or maybe it's "XML") may be the answer. I've also got some bookmarks for currency conversion sites and stuff. Anyway, if anybody has done something similar, I'd appreciate any tips. I'm really new at this and I don't want to mess up.

Thanks!

Get somebody with experience

[bill_mcgonigle]

I3ML is a language for creating user interfaces. It is a language that has all that is needed to create a rich Windows user interface, and nothing that is not ... I3ML is XML; ... I3ML is an XML dialect for describing Windows user interfaces ... datetime pickers, grids, groupboxes, menu bars, panels, picturepanels, speedbars, tabsets, toolbars, trees, windows...

Somebody [mozilla.org] at the Mozilla [mozilla.org] project would add alot of credibility to the committee, showing that the standard has some relevance.

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.

The good thing about standards bodies...

[mivok]

is that there are just so many of them.

IEEE has a good standards site

[lwbecker2]

Not sure if it is totally related to your effort, but the IEEE has a real nice standards site [ieee.org].

There is also a page there specifically set up for development [ieee.org] of standards.

It includes:

Working Group Development
Writing the Draft
Ballottig the Draft
Final Approval
Publishing a Standard
Reaffirming the Standard

and has a link to IEEE Standard Forms.

There are standards meccanos that really work

[nomad42]

I am actively participating into standards (health care: HL7 and DICOM, Swiss eGovernment and the like) and one of the most effective standards bodies I had ecountered is DICOM. Search for "DICOM" on http://www.nema.org/ What impressed me is the relative speed of progress. The basic idea is to invite *all* relevant industry players, make them paying members of the body and agree on the procedures. These procdures prevent any bias towards a specific vendors solution. Consensus is found by ballotting and voting. It works. The idea of promoting the new standard to an ISO standard may be persued later on.

Standards bodies

[sql*kitten]

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?"

No, but this is Slashdot, so I'll stick my oar in anyway.

The usefulness of a standard is directly related to the prestige of the standards body. If the IEEE say something's a standard, then people sit up and take notice. If W3C or ECMA say something is a standard, then you can reasonably expect people to comply with it.

If the objective here is to be a genuine standard, then submit it to ECMA. If it's to be a marketing tool (sounds like it, since the sole vendor is the one that will control the body, even if it's nominally independant) then don't expect anyone to pay any attention.