Standards

https://raw.github.com/xi/standards_talk/2013-11-13/standards.htm

What is a standard?

• A (technical) specification is a standard if it is widely established.
• It may be a de facto or de jure standard, where only the latter has gone through a formal standardization process with an established standardization organisation.
• A standard therefore needs legitimacy

parties involved

stakeholders

anyone with an interest in a proposed standard

implementors

anyone who will implement (parts of) the standard

users

anyone who might use an implementation

sponsor

proposes a specification for standardization

parties involved

standardization organisation

organisation which manages the standardization process

working group (WG)

the people who manage the standardization process for the standardization organisation

advisors/experts

external people who are asked to participate in the standardization process. May be members of the working group

open standard

• anyone (especially implementors) have unrestricted access (e.g. no fees or classification)
• free implementations must exist
• anyone can participate in the creation and further development of the standard

http://documentfreedom.org/openstandards.html http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html

decentralization

• hacker ethics call for decentralization
• standards provide ways for decentralizing technology
• at the same time, the standardization process itself is necessarily centralized
• everyone respects standards
• very few people know how standards are created

overview of standardization organisations

International Organisation for Standardization (ISO)

• ISO 639 – Codes for the representation of names of languages (de_DE)
• ISO 8601 – Representation of dates and times (1999-12-31 23:59:58)
• ISO/IEC 8859 – 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets

International Organisation for Standardization (ISO)

• ISO/IEC 26300 – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0
• ISO/IEC 29500 – Office Open XML File Formats

International Organisation for Standardization (ISO)

• "network of national standards bodies"
• specs are not open (fees)
• only member organisations are allowed to vote
• "fast-track procedure" possible if the document was developed by an international standardizing body recognized by the ISO Council

Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN)

• german member of ISO
• DIN 476 (ISO 216): international paper sizes

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

• IEEE 802.x – networking
• IEEE 1003 – Unix compatibility programming standard - POSIX
• allowed to vote is "any individual who has expressed an interest in the subject matter of the standard"

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

• RFC 1034/1035 DNS
• RFC 1157 IMAP
• RFC 2616 HTTP
• RFC 2821 SMTP

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

• RFC 1149 IP on Avian Carriers (Pidgins)
• RFC 2324 Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

• Request for Comments (RFC)
• "rough consensus and running code"
• discussion on archived mailing lists

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• founded and headed by Tim Berners-Lee
• HTML/CSS
• WCAG/ARIA (Accessibility)

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Working Draft

anyone is asked for comment

Candidate Recommendation

implementors are asked for feedback

Proposed Recommendation

W3C advisory council is asked to approve

W3C Recommendation

process is completed

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

• no certification program, but free validators
• members are mostly big companies like IBM, Google, Facebook, Deutsche Telekom etc.
• discussion on archived mailing lists
• Possible to submit bugs from draft (Example: HTML5 draft)

Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHAT WG)

• formed when W3C was moving in a different direction than implementors
• HTML5

python/bittorrent

• PEP/BEP (Python/BitTorrent Enhancement Proposals)
• "rough consensus and running code"
• author responsible for building consensus
• open source reference implementation needed
• spec must be in public domain
• Benevolent Dictator for Life, Guido van Rossum/Bram Cohen

summary: standardization process

• someone proposes a draft
• it must be accepted for consideration
• a working group may be formed
• the process may go through several phases getting inputs from the general public, experts and implementors

summary: standardization process

• a high majority or even consensus is required
• additional requirements (e.g. reference implementation)
• the final vote is on a closed group of people, e.g. benevolent dictators or member organisations

critique

[...] the ostensibly open process of the W3C actually isn’t open: It’s dominated by multinationals; the opinions of everyone other than invited experts can be and are ignored; invited-expert status has been refused or revoked; the Working Group can claim that “consensus” has been reached even in the face of unresolved internal disagreement; the process is itself inaccessible to people with disabilities, like deaf people; WCAG Working Group chairs have acted like bullies. -- http://www.wcagsamurai.org/erratas/introduction/

What we can learn from this

• standards as an unusual product of an participation process
• decision making in a given process needs to be standardized
• most current standardization processes are optimized for output legitimacy by providing enough resources to reach a high quality specification, maybe even a consensus
• discussions are done using bug-trackers, mailinglists and long dicussions

What we can provide for this

• a better tool for proposing alternative versions and commenting (absatzweise Kommentieren)
• reaching consensus in long meetings and discussions is currently out of our scope