Home from Oxford

 Conference  2 Responses »
Jul 312007
 

As usu­al, the trip to the XML Sum­mer School in Oxford was excel­lent. I learned a lot and met some inter­est­ing people and had fun too, even though I’ve decided that two trips to Europe, with a one-year-old, in 26 days, is a little too much travel in a short peri­od of time. The XML Sum­mer School had day­care, oth­er­wise I really would­n’t have been able to cope. I think the baby enjoyed the trip as well; she made lots of new friends and I star­ted call­ing her “Prin­cess” because of the way she waved and simpered. I am extremely grate­ful for all the work the Sum­mer School organ­isers and the day­care people put in to make the trip as easy as possible.

I did­n’t see a lot of the flood­ing and was only tan­gen­tially affected by it; I do have memor­ies of the water slosh­ing around on the arrivals floor in Ter­min­al 1 when I arrived on the morn­ing of Fri­day 20th July and the attempts people were mak­ing to stop it going down into the base­ment where the Tube and the tun­nels to get to oth­er parts of the air­port are loc­ated. The tun­nel out of Heath­row was down to one lane and it was closed in the oth­er dir­ec­tion. I was­n’t sur­prised to learn later that sev­er­al flights had been cancelled.

Although in the centre of Oxford, where we were, there were few signs of the floods (a couple of roads closed off), sur­round­ing areas were strongly affected. One friend who cycled in to meet us at the pub crawl on Wed­nes­day found it sur­real that his area was full of sand­bags and people pan­ick­ing about the rising ground­wa­ter, while a short bike ride away people were going shop­ping, going to the pub, and gen­er­ally behav­ing the way they would without the floods.

The punt­ing was can­celled of course, the Cher­well was just too high and too fast for it to be safe; there was a cer­tain amount of nervous­ness about los­ing a del­eg­ate or two.

Punts on the Cherwell River by the Boathouse

Before the Sum­mer School star­ted, I met up with a friend on the Sunday for lunch. We went to The Fishes in North Hink­sey, a cute little place with a ver­andah and a play­ground and a pic­nic area. Which would have been great for the baby to crawl around in, if it had­n’t been under a cer­tain amount of water at the time.

flooded_playground flooded_picnic_area

All in all, I was quite glad to see the sun again when I got home to Van­couver, and to be happy we don’t live on a flood plain.

Off to Oxford

 Family, General  3 Responses »
Jul 192007
 

I’m leav­ing for Oxford this after­noon; haven’t had much time for blog­ging in the last few days, what with recov­er­ing from the Ber­lin trip and get­ting ready for this one. Not to men­tion cop­ing with an extremely clingy tod­dler, who gets jeal­ous of Mummy’s laptop, and the phone, and any­one who dares get in between us. Wish me luck on the flight — she’ll either be a per­fect little angel because she has me to her­self or (and this is more likely) drive me com­pletely bonkers.

Definition of Open Standards

 Standards  5 Responses »
Jul 122007
 

Rick Jel­liffe, who’s been in the middle of lots of stand­ards efforts, writes on the sub­ject at Is our idea of “Open Stand­ards” good enough? Veri­fi­able vendor-neut­ral­ity. Worth read­ing, although he does make the assump­tion that the term “open stand­ards” means “cre­ated by some stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion”. Although that’s a tempt­ing defin­i­tion, and the one used by a lot of people (and the one I hap­pen to prefer), it’s not the only defin­i­tion that I’ve seen. I’ve seen three main cat­egor­ies of defin­i­tions of the term “open stand­ard” when applied to some specification:

  • Any­one can read the spe­cific­a­tion (usu­ally without pay­ing); often applied to pro­pri­et­ary spe­cific­a­tions which are treated as de facto standards.
  • Cre­ated in a stand­ards organ­iz­a­tion that allows any­one to take part who has rel­ev­ant expert­ise or can pay the appro­pri­ate dues.
  • Able to be used in any open source pro­jects (i.e., there are restric­tions on the types of licenses that can be used).

Recog­nising that lots of people use the term “open stand­ard” to mean dif­fer­ent things, the Liberty Alli­ance recently pub­lished what that term means in the con­text of Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines. It’s called the Liberty Alli­ance Com­mit­ment to Open Stand­ards and it’s a very brief doc­u­ment out­lining a set of con­di­tions for those spe­cific­a­tions and guidelines (yes, the doc­u­ment talks about tech­nic­al spe­cific­a­tions but really it applies to oth­er types of doc­u­ments as well). The top item in the list of con­di­tions to be an open stand­ard, to answer Rick­’s main point that rather than talk­ing “open stand­ard­s” we need to be talk­ing as much of “verifiable vendor-neut­ral­ity”, is can­not be con­trolled by any single per­son or entity with any ves­ted interests.

I dis­agree with Rick when he says that only ISO is truly vendor-neut­ral since only nation­al bod­ies vote, as those nation­al bod­ies could in the­ory be swayed by vendors. What you really want is to bal­ance the needs of all parties (vendors, users, gov­ern­ments), but that’s dif­fi­cult to attain in any organ­iz­a­tion. You need not only an organ­iz­a­tion that is set up to allow for input from all those stake­hold­ers (to pro­duce stand­ards that are evolved and man­aged in a trans­par­ent pro­cess open to all inter­ested parties and approved through due pro­cess by rough con­sensus among par­ti­cipants) but you also need to have enough par­ti­cipants who are inter­ested in the end res­ult, and have the appro­pri­ate expert­ise. And you need a com­pet­ent chair for each com­mit­tee, of course.

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