Setting the Standard
by Liora Alschuler
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Pages: 1, 2, 3
Follow The Money
An old socialist sociologist once taught me that if you want to understand a system, follow the money. When I look at how the various standards-writing outfits support themselves, I come up with these models:
- private (typically corporate) funds: participants are well-endowed, and most costs are borne by participants, rather than the standards body. When committees meet six times a year on four continents, this defines a rather elite club.
- membership: some combination of individual, corporate, or institutional dues, with power in the organization apportioned to those who actually pay the freight. In this model, corporate dollars seem to speak the loudest.
- sale of intellectual property
- public funds through tax dollars, grants, or public agencies
The question is, what best supports the democratic apportionment of power and the need for concerted development? The trust fund model is not a replicable model for an industry. The membership model? Only if you believe that affluent corporations are the only true citizens. Sale of intellectual property? This is increasingly difficult in an open-source world.
There is a purism about standards writing that seems to say, if you are accepting money, somehow your motives are tainted, your work is suspect. Yet very few people do this work without financial support. "Paid" and "volunteer" merely designate whether the funding is through an employer (who sees a business interest in the outcome) or through a public agency (which sees a public benefit in the outcome.)
It is time to jettison the illusion that committees of volunteers working on hypertime can produce an original solution without full support from staff, experts who are not working 65 hours/week, and professional writers and editors. It is time to jettison the idea that the loft of a standard is commensurate with either the poverty and self-sacrifice of the authors, or related to the power and self-interest of the progenitors.
Disdain for the exchange of money during standards building is an aristocratic affectation that is out of place in an "open" process where meetings are frequent and held across multiple continents. Apart from dues, participating in standards development demands time and usually travel. Even where dues are set to allow the participation of individuals, most individuals cannot both earn a living and participate. Simply assuring open membership does not assure open access when there is no underwriter for the process, and today those underwriters come almost exclusively from the corporate sector.
Who Should Write Standards?
The final arbiter will always be the marketplace and, again, this is both necessary and good. The last thing we want to do is preclude innovation from whatever quarter. While the marketplace always has the last say, it is incapable of choosing a good standard when none is presented, and it does not consider long-term good when short term profits are at stake. So how can we build a reliable source of standards?
The answer to this is on neither side of the direct-participation vs. representation debate, and is not completely addressed by specification of internal group process. We have to have an organization that can foster intensive intellectual effort and shoulder the on-going process of maintaining and building consensus around the standard. We need the processes described by Jon Bosak and under development at OASIS, but we also need to fund these organizations in such a manner that they can foster sustained, creative, independent work. We need both leadership and consensus building.
So, how should government be involved, and where should the money come from? Professional societies and industry consortia have a role, as do government and regulatory agencies. I'd like to suggest a National Endowment for standards writing; a set-aside -- even a voluntary one -- created through profits of companies who have benefited from existence of standards. In essence, this is what the W3C has designed itself to be, by soliciting funds from interested parties and, to some degree, insulating the process from their direct control. NIST, which already invests heavily in seeding technology, could start a program to underwrite the development of the standards that are most needed. In fact, if you shake the family tree of ebXML, you'll find that one of the strong influences, the CommerceOne eCo Framework is the third generation of standards writing done under a NIST grant.
Financial support alone, of course, is not sufficient, and not everything can be standardized -- indeed not everything is ready to be standardized. As my co-chair in HL7, Dr. Robert Dolin of Kaiser Permanente, likes to say, "A standard can't be written before its time." In this context, the failure of the Department of Health and Human Services to meet the initial deadline for regulations protecting privacy of patient records reflects real uncertainty on the best course of action, rather than a failure of technical leadership. Additionally, just having industry representatives sit on a committee is not equivalent to reference implementations, a requirement that is embedded in the process of groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Object Management Group (OMG).
An open, democratic process and public financing form a necessary, but not sufficient, context to ensure good work. If you ignore either process or the financial subsidy for standards writing, you put the power into the hands of those with a strong self-interest and the ability to pay.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the excellent criticism and insight I received from a number of readers and interviewees--Jon Bosak, Tim Bray, Michael Champion, Bob Dolin, Mary Kratz, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, John Spinosa, Lauren Wood. While their comments were invaluable, they are of course, not responsible for the outcome.
