Anyway

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.