Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

Politics By Any Other Name ...

XML.com: Politics By Any Other Name [May. 12, 2004].  Superb!  Finally, someone who deals straight-out about how everything around cooperative activity (including claims that such-and-such is "political") is political.  In the world where we are economical and social actors, politics is the name of the game.  It is indeed the art of the possible, when engaged in its highest form.

This Kendall Grant Cark article is about technical arrangements, committees, "standards" as a way to legitimize or impugn whatever it is that isn't "standard" for you, and so on.  Although it is about the development of specifications for XML technologies and applications, the sense in which politics is the glue for the success of the arrangements can be discerned without recognizing the alphabet soup, or the technical subject matter.

This article also shows that there are a large number of observant people who can add the perspective of direct experience.  This completely reflects my standards-organization and standards-development work spread over 40 years.  (Ouch, I just did the math.)  I would add that, in the United States, we always had, in ANSI, a non-governmental organization, and standards compliance has always been voluntary.  The creation of mandatory compliance came from other bodies who adopted ANSI (and other) standards by reference in their regulations.

Kendall also points out the Achilles heel of the standards bodies that depend on the sale of the specifications for revenue.  This makes ISO irrelevant, especially in information technology where practitioners rarely see an honest-to-god specification.  ANSI's model is slightly more ductile. ANSI does sell specifications in electronic form, and they tend to be more affordable.

I think the IETF approach is a benchmark for accessibility, open-ness of the process, and transparency to consideration of public interest, and their definition of what makes a standard a standard (and also what makes a good specification of a proposed standard) are superb.  And it does not take long to discern that the process is also a political one.
posted by Dennis at 5/12/2004 07:07:47 PM