An OASIS BoD candidate message from Ron Lake

["Scott McGrath" <scott.mcgrath@oasis-open.org>]

Hi,

My name is Ron Lake and I am running for a position on the OASIS Board of
Directors.  I am doing so because I believe that the IT industry really
needs standards to grow, and to foster change and innovation. Without
standards, a huge fraction of the IT dollars go into everything but
increasing the real productivity of software users. This diminishes the
importance and scale of the IT sector of the economy. 

Open standards imply a leveling of the playing field and have been a major
force for innovation. 

I think the past 20 years has also taught us that standards are the vehicle
to grow the entire IT platform.  It was not so long ago that there was no
agreement on inter-network addressing - or how to send data from one place
to another.  The adoption of standards in these areas has enabled us to move
up the stack and begin to develop standards for content representation,
security, and business process integration. Standards are the means of
incorporating the accumulated knowledge of the whole industry into the IT
platform of the future. 

I bring to the position a life spent in the development of advanced software
systems - real time systems - simulation - process control - embedded
systems - and for the past 20 years - distributed geographic information
systems.  I have authored and reviewed many types of specifications. Our
company has pioneered the use of many OASIS specifications in the geographic
information domain - such as SAML, XACML, and ebRIM.  We believe that
standards organizations have to work with one another to build an
interconnected framework of standards for the evolution of the IT platform
into the future.

I bring to the position a range of experiences from IT manager to marketing
executive to engineering VP to CEO - and the energy and vision to make
things happen.

I would be most pleased to receive your support.

Cheers

Ron Lake