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Subject: Re: [ubl-comment] Metastandards
At 01:34 PM 1/31/02, Jon wrote: >At the EIDX/CompTIA meeting in Palo Alto this week, Stephenie >Cooper gave a presentation on standards for the creation of >standards that will, I hope, provide no guidance whatsoever for >the UBL effort. Knowing that this seminal piece is sure to set >the standard for standards standardization, I have asked for and >received Stephenie's permission to post it on the UBL web site, >where you can find it at > > http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/misc/200201/metastd.ppt Although the presentation was funny, it illustrated the foibles of standards inventors, rather than to lampoon the progenitors of meta standards who are just beginning to get started :-) What Steph. could have done would provide satire or insight into the *process* of classification and convergence of overlapping and redundant standards. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people seriously trying to get a grip on standards that overlap and compete. Karl Nagel for example treated me to a hilarious tour of this space in September, he went on for 20 minutes on the business model of certain suspected standards bodies who get in front of the parade, assume the mantle of leadership, start charging big fees and generally take the whole public discourse offline! Their process is value creation because, by capturing what was, before, the open prairie, killing all the indians and putting fences around it, these companies create profit for their members who then can create IP in an orderly way. Karl was describing these collections of ideas meme balls, and a new physics of gravitational memeballs that get bigger and bigger inside these protected spaces.. Karl suggested a new standards body called the Association of Prognosticators, Pontificators and Predicters" (my notes get illegible here), and how these guys principle talent is really predicting the direction of parades early enough to get entrenched with a standards dialog before the numbers get too big. Karl said, they need to set ethical standards to restrain their worst abusers from screwing up the business model for everybody else! Hilarious. The goal of the 3P cubed would be to figure out revenue models, figure out the process dynamics, of being more meta than anybody else, for example, the W3C. Immobilize their static metametameta stuff. Abstract it. Get over the emotional hurdle. hilarious! Accountants have lately woken up to the fact that our national org, the AICPA, and our state associations of CPAs are composed mostly of people who know nothing about accounting, and who are career "organization administrators". Sheesh. CPAs are their food source. When we're gone they will go eat doctors or ship captains or whatever. The Orlando Interop Dec 7-8 was a 2-day session attended by 100 people dedicated to nothing else but the interoperability between different standards. The conference didn't produce any grand solution; but they did produce a good listing of 38 causal forces that inhibit the interoperability or harmonization of standards. Then, after a number of hours these were boiled down into categories A through M ("Let me count the ways", Standards Bodies are inhibited from cooperating! ) Those are available on the powerpoints http://www.omg.org/interop hmm here it is http://www.omg.org/interop/presentations/SummitResults.pdf The Interop. also did not produce any such classification scheme by which to identify the domains of standards organizations. That would be HIGHLY useful. Actually, a couple of people coughed up some lists of standards for various domains that were VERY interesting.. Everybody circumlocuted delicately around any *particular* instances of overlap, collision. This was, after all, a session composed of the major standards bodies and their home orgs. (DISA with its collection, OMG with its collection, OASIS with its TCs, a few smaller voices such as the UN CEFACT MOU, etc. ) You begin to realize how many of the world's standards are really products of companies called standards bodies, and their practices would be a rich source of humor, Stephanie get to work! :-) ISO, OMG, OASIS, W3C, IETF, DISA, ANSI. You could ask "Why do some organizations make all of their domain workgroups submit to harmonization while others, do not provide any harmonization layer? And why don't any of them make their TCs and WGs, harmonize externally? " And which would be worse? A big alliance, tightly integrated with each other but not interoperating with anybody else, or a big collection of smaller focused standards that has no other way to survive but to cooperate with the whole global marketplace. My minor contribution to this conference was to suggest a market system be established, based on quantified points. Standards bodies would get points when they help other groups technically, or surrender turf or make sacrifices, etc. within a market system. http://cgi.omg.org/pub/mail/summit-attendees (My suggestion is about 1/3 of the way down, search for Suasion bucks) But now I think, something a lot more fun and profitable could be done by anybody who wanted to work hard, and maybe even capture some dues money, in the process. :-) This enterprising individual would set up a legislature, a process for getting it staffed with good people, who would then pass laws on the most obvious things. (All of this in good humor, of course). For example it might be illegal to go out and invent a new standard for payments, without acknowledging the existing 75 standards for payments and saying what was wrong with all of the other ones. It might be illegal to charge money for the specification document of a standard after that standard was successful in achieving more than 50% market share such that nobody had any g(^(^+'ed choice but to use the standard. It would be illegal for the chair or other decision makers to exercise normal discretion in decisionmaking in the details of standards without a vote of the full body, if that executive were a vendor who benefited by the decision. All that kind of stuff. It would be illegal to pronounce any specification a "standard" without at least, an approved RAND license etc. etc. Then the fun part would be "Standards Police" who would issue "summonses" to the standard body and tell them to appear in a Kangaroo Court, to defend their practices, and the court of course would be a jury system with more volunteers. (We could do this out on Slashdot, you know, the Jerry Springer audience is already available. You don't even need to pay for hosting :-) Why not? It would be fun, and this would be a great opportunity for over-the-hill people who can't do productive technical work to make themselves a pain in the ass, throw their weight around etc. which is probably all they really wanted to do anyway! :-) Each standards body could send delegates to serve terms as Standards Police, Standards Judges, Standards Juries etc. This would serve as a kind of a kidney for the standards bodies, enabling them all to expel their most quarrelsome members. This is just as most countries ruling elites formed up armies of their lower classes and sent them off to wars, from time to time, before the nuclear era. I hope I have insulted everybody evenhandedly with this diatribe, Bwa ha ha! With highest regards for you all, really, just having fun with this, TOdd
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