{"id":25,"date":"2004-11-05T14:16:21","date_gmt":"2004-11-05T14:16:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/wordp\/?p=25"},"modified":"2004-11-05T14:16:21","modified_gmt":"2004-11-05T14:16:21","slug":"steve-vinoskis-comments-on-the-ws-standardisation-track","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/?p=25","title":{"rendered":"Steve Vinoski&#8217;s comments on the WS* standardisation track"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following on from my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gaisan.com\/blogs\/archives\/technology\/index.html#a000005\">earlier post<\/a> about WS standardisation. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.iona.com\/blogs\/vinoski\/archives\/000113.html\">Steve Vinoksi points out<\/a> that traditional standardisation efforts are often too slow and overly political. In this month&#8217;s IEEE Distributed Systems Online <i>(DSO)<\/i> he discusses <a href=\"http:\/\/dsonline.computer.org\/0412\/d\/w6towp.htm\">WS-NonexistentStandards<\/a>. Lots of standardisation work but <b>where are the accepted standards<\/b> and how does the process facilitate the creation and adoption of practical standards?<br \/>\nTo get around these problems, WS-* authors appear to be taking a different approach toward standardization:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ol>\n<li>Write a specification and make it publicly available. <\/li>\n<li>Invite interested parties to one or more private workshops where they can learn more details about the specification and provide feedback. <\/li>\n<li>Iterate steps 1 and 2 until chosen feedback from the workshop participants has been incorporated, and the specification is considered finished. <\/li>\n<li>Submit the specification to an official standards body with the hope of fast tracking it to actual standardization with minimal changes. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Overall, this approach reduces the number of participants involved, which can be a good thing because it reduces the overall volume of communication required to create the specification and resulting standard. However, <b>it can also reduce the resulting standard\u2019s effectiveness, even rendering it useless, because it circumvents at least some of the process of building consensus by not being a truly open process. <\/b> A standard that is not generally agreed on is a standard on paper only.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This definitely seems to be part of the problem. It&#8217;s in marked contrast to the IETF standardisation process which <b>often appears<\/b> much more open and perhaps democratic. However, it&#8217;s a fine line to walk. I can&#8217;t help but feel that 2 modifications to the process would significantly improve matters.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>The creation of WS-arch so we can categorically say what piece of the WS-jigsaw goes WS-where? \ud83d\ude09<\/li>\n<li>Incentivised involvement of independent s\/w developers in the standardisation process. Spec consumers rather than spec producer\/pushers who can&#8217;t provide neutral guidance. Maybe even some decisions could be put to general developers using a web-based voting system.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Probably\/definitely need to think about this more&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following on from my earlier post about WS standardisation. Steve Vinoksi points out that traditional standardisation efforts are often too slow and overly political. In this month&#8217;s IEEE Distributed Systems Online (DSO) he discusses WS-NonexistentStandards. Lots of standardisation work but where are the accepted standards and how does the process facilitate the creation and adoption [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gaisan.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}