Communicating About Standards
While working this morning on my Resources page, I was reminded again of a topic that I feel quite strongly about and have spoken of on a number of occasions: the need to communicate about standards activities. By this I mean the need for standards organizations to publish, in a consistent and preferably central manner, the status of activities that they are working on and the results of that work.
Why is this important? The nature of standards, that they are an agreement on how things should be done, implies that the standard needs be communicated. If everyone is supposed to do things in the same way, how are they supposed to do so if they don’t know what that way is? A secret standard defeats the purpose of standardization. Whether the use of the standard is voluntary or mandated, if a user or implementor doesn’t know about the standard then they won’t use it.
Further, by publishing information about work being done the standards organizations will prevent duplication of effort, increase participation, and decrease market confusion. Given the means to find out what work exists a person or company needing a standard solution to a particular problem can look for existing answers rather than starting a new effort, join and participate in an existing activity, or adopt an existing standard. While there is sometimes value in having different solutions to a particular problem, too many solutions requires a lot of duplication of effort, spreads resources thin, and defeats the advantages of having a standard.
The problem begins with the number of organizations that develop standards. There are hundreds, if not thousands, in the world today. Lists of standards organizations may be found at at ANSI, CEN, SES, WSSN, and ConsortiumInfo.org. And those are mostly just the U.S.-based and international level organizations; I’m sure that there are a lot more. Then consider the number of standards completed by or in progress at these organizations.
Most organizations are fairly good about publishing the results of their work; they have, individually, interests in seeing their standards adopted. But given the huge number of organizations, how does one go about finding a standards that meets his needs? This is compounded by the problem that each organization publishes their work in a different format; every web page is in a different format and requires a different set of mouse clicks to find the desired information.
So I’ve been suggesting for some time the idea of having a single database, or at the very least a set of linked databases, that will contain standardized (what a concept) information about every standard developed, or in development, by every standards organization. A person interested in finding a standard solution for a particular problem or topic can perform a single search to find all of the standards completed or in development in that area. Everyone that I’ve suggested this idea to over the past few years has thought that it was a great idea, but no one thought enough of it that they wanted to fund the effort. That seems to be the biggest problem: funding. The solution would require hosting for a web site and database, and salaries for the people involved in gathering, entering, and maintaining the information. CEN had embarked on just such a project a few years ago, but the funding ran out after a couple of years so the project was shelved. ANSI has an ongoing effort with their NSSN database but it appears to be mostly a front end to their e-store for purchasing standards.
A possible alternative is for each organization to enter and maintain their own information. But getting standards organizations to work together, however noble the goal, is worse than herding cats. I’ve tried suggesting this, but the organizations I talked to insisted that they were just fine publishing their own information in their own way, i.e. in a manner different than their peers.
So, does anyone else feel strongly about this topic? Strongly enough to fund such an effort? Please step forward.