The Standards Bottleneck
From IRF Wiki
In each area discussed at the IR Forum, the call for better standards was repeated over and over again. And despite the strong desire for more and better standards, few expressed hope that the need for standards would be met soon. For example, in the areas of Real World Aw
The Need for Standards
- Web 2.0: Standards for common functions such as user authentication.
- Real World Awareness: Standards for the semantics of information gathered by sensors and for looking up contextual information.
- IT Security: Standards for mechanisms of security such as software attestation and light weight encryption.
- IT for Growth and Development: Standards for equipment that could actually be used in the environment of the developing world and could be maintained and provide value that would lead to sustainability.
Agile Standards: A New Approach
In many ways the desire for standards represents a sort of greed and impatience that ignores the lessons of agile development. Standards are designed to meet certain needs. The desire for standards is the desire for a working system that everyone can agree on. But experience has shown that standards definition can be both a political battleground and an example of the failure of collaborative design.
The example of Web 2.0's perpetual beta and of agile development perhaps show a way out. When a community wants standards for a particular purpose an experimental period could be declared in which prototype systems were developed and put into limited production. This experience could confirm the requirements that the standards are aimed at meeting and provide insights into how to adjust the standards to make implementation easier.
- We could talk to current standards bodies such as Oasis, W3C, and the Open Group about these ideas.
