Standards Article

[Tom Worthington]

At 07:02 PM 8/10/97 +1000, Tony Barry wrote:

>...I'm pretty sure that formal standards bodies have ALWAYS been 
>dominated by "proprietry" interests as they were the people with the 
>reps there and with the expertise and funding...

My limited experience of being on SA IT/15 (Software Engineering) and in the
balloting group for IEEE-CS Software Engineering standards is that the
commercial interests are usually not overt. There are university, customer
and Government people on the committees, as well as those making the
products. I recall only one instance where there was a claim of stacking a
committee with representatives of one company.

The trick is to have a balance of competing interests from different
companies and indoctrinating the committee members to look to the common
interest.


Tom Worthington <tomw@acslink.net.au> President, Australian Computer Society,
GPO Box 446, Canberra ACT 2601 http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw
Fax: +61 2 62496419
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ACS on Information Ministry: http://www.acs.org.au/news/alston.htm