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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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