Hi All,
Good discussion.
Reading Ed's posting, one is stimulated to think of larger issues. such as:
1. Do standards committees ever stray into the region of illegal monopolistic activities? (Some of them consist mainly of supposedly competing companies.)
2. Similarly, do they sometimes illegally overhang the marketplace?
Cheers, -- Adrian
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Adrian Walker
Reengineering
On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 11:57 AM, Ed Barkmeyer <edbark@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
As a standards professional
(I regret to say), I just can't pass this up:
John F Sowa wrote:
The W3C should have declared that anybody who could not pass a simple
test on FOL would be disqualified from voting. Every professional group
has minimum standards for membership *and* voting. You cannot allow
incompetents to vote on technical issues.
Ah, but standards bodies are
not necessarily 'professional groups' in the sense of 'professional
societies'. They are merely sets of persons representing organzations
(or sometimes themselves) with the political will and sufficient
technical know-how (somewhere among them) to get a standard made for
some set of reasons. The value of one contributor may be to keep the
meetings on track, the value of another may be to write the agreements
clearly, and the value of three others may be in their ability to
discuss and resolve the deep technical issues, and the value of two
more may be to ensure that you don't have to understand the problem at
that level in order to use the standard correctly, and there may be yet
one or two more whose value is to translate between terminologies and
find compromises. It takes a village... How are you going to test
their qualifications for that?
In functional standards bodies, the less expert defer to the experts in
matters of technical precision. In dysfunctional standards bodies,
they don't. As Neal Laurance, a long time standards professional from
Ford once observed, the harmless dysfunctional bodies debate endlessly
and don't ever produce standards; the dangerous dysfunctional bodies
silence the experts and produce bad standards.
But there is also the matter of differences in objective, and that is
where the real problems arise. The objective of standardizing X may
involve a group that wants to standardize exactly X, e.g., a
description logic language, vs. a group that wants to standardize
X-plus, or X in the context of XYZ. The investment guru, Fred Kitzler,
once observed that "standards are agreements made by vendors to their
perceived mutual advantage." The two groups have somewhat different
target markets with somewhat different needs. The X group wants to be
sure that the standard solves their problem, with a minimum of
"unnecessary junk" that will slow down implementation or confuse
users. The X-plus group wants to be sure that the standard is part
of the solution to their problem without locking out other elements
of their larger program, a sort of 'upward compatibility' idea. These
are both legitimate technical and business objectives that often lead
to technical conflict.
Academics can add to such a body the deep expertise that leads to a
viable basis for a common solution, or they can just add religious
purism to one side or the other.
I don't know how to create a good standards committee. I only know one
when I see one. The good ones make good, not necessarily excellent,
standards efficiently, and they do it with a combination of people who
have different skills but can work well together. And even then, we
all know that techical excellence in a product doesn't necessarily
beget either success or value.
-Ed--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 Cel: +1 240-672-5800
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority."
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