Rigo Wenning (W3C) <rigo@w3.org>
SSOKU09
13-14 January 2009
Brussels, Belgium
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Standardization can best be understood as the process aiming to define common and mutually agreed (technical) solutions between relevant stakeholders, for the benefit of all involved. It will help encouraging the free movement of goods, thus help to remove technical barriers, open up new markets, and enable new economic models. Working with all stakeholders helps to create economies of scale while at the same time increasing opportunities for product differentiation and competition and services.
Economies of scale create so called economic network effects
. If a
technology has reached a certain scale, the benefit of participating and the
economic value of having a stake in that technology increases with every new
participant. In more popular terms we often refer to this effect when saying
a technology takes off
. Those economic network effects have a huge
impact, but are also very hard to generate. On the Internet, one stakeholder
(even a big IT company) alone is almost unable to create sufficient impact,
awareness and growth to reach the bar necessary to create such network effects.
Working together in Working Groups to develop common grounds and pushing a
certain technology together increases the chance of having real impact and
recognition.
Much research today is based on the existing infrastructure. While basic research may also question the fundaments of the infrastructure, it is unlikely that it will be deployed unless it has disruptive huge benefits and a sound basis in commercial interest. This means applied research is well adviced to base incremental innovation on the existing world. This infrastructure has its own rules and constraints. But the constraints can be extended, features added. This is done in the relevant Specification Developing Organization (SDO). The connection to the relevant SDO should be done already in the project planning phase.
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Sometimes, SDOs can be a great facilitator for technologoy transfer. SDOs generally provide good connection to the industry. Some research projects are closer to applied research and could greatly benefit of industry leverage. Going to an SDO and using that platform to develop something jointly with the industry can create great synergies. Deliverables can be used as direct input to the SDO and can thus benefit from greater scrutiny and outreach. With the help of the industry, critical mass can be reached. But this requires flexibility from the SDO, the project and the industry to leave the usual paths in their respective domains.
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Promotional efforts aim to create maximum awareness of a project's objectives, goals and benefits among its main target groups: IST research projects, standardization working groups and relevant industrial organisations. Dissemination of project's results through standards bodies in general brings projects higher international recognition, collaboration opportunities, and the ability to cooperate with a variety of specialists, thus benefiting from their collective expertise. This will lead to an additional validation process by a wider expert audience that may be closer to the market. These experts well understand standards' key role in encouraging innovation, improving markets and creating competitive opportunities.
Finding like minded people on the Web or on the Internet is rather easy. There are even many of the new kind of social network services helping with this task. Mostly, researchers know their colleagues in academia and have even a good overview of current industrial development. But talking to people alone is not sufficient to start working together. Standardization gives a platform for joint development of technologies. It has well established rules and processes that enable people to work together in a inspiring and balanced environment. If projects want to create such an environment it will take them too much effort and time thus increasing the standardization gap.
One of the very important use cases for standardization is the large cooperation between multiple projects, even internationally. How to integrate other initiatives from other stakeholders and even other continents remains a big issue in current European research. Occasional contacts to other projects can be informal, but as soon as many projects want to work together -industry included-, the organization of such cooperation becomes difficult. It is not sufficient -as many believe- that one would just need a mailing-list and some web space. There is much more to it like dispute resoluton, cooperation tools and the establishment of basic rules for cooperation. Modern standardization organizations provide all of that. So instead of re-inventing the wheel for every project, SDOs may help organize the larger cooperation of a project if this is needed.
EU IST Projects normally organize themselves around a consortium agreement. The project takes a while to establish the cooperation tools. SDOs do exactly the same. The rules for internal cooperation and decision making are normally called «Process». Working partly inside an SDO has the advantage of having an established set of rules for cooperation. If a project wants to connect to an SDO it should already take into account the SDO's process while making the consortium agreement. Considerable burden and waste of time can evolve from frictions between the internal consortium agreement and the process of the SDO the project wants to influence. If the collaboration is smooth, a lot of synergies can be achieved.
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Progressing your project’s deliverables through the standardization process can be a time-consuming process. Although there may be – depending on the nature of the input you intend to deliver, as well as on the type of standard you decide to pursue – ways to achieve your goals within 6-12 months, mostly standardisation processes will take longer and require between 1 and 3 years.
Your project will however have a limited lifespan and will most likely not be able to allocate resources to standards work beyond that lifespan. In order to safeguard ongoing standardization work from falling apart after the completion of your project contract, you will either have to:
For these reasons it is recommended to plan interfacing with standards organizations at the beginning of your project’s activities. Even though your deliverables will not be available yet, it will help you synchronize with relevant ongoing standardization processes, and start the process of building the consensus required in order to achieve the goals you are pursuing.
Postponing this interfacing until your standardization deliverables are completed – usually towards the end of your project – will delay the standardization process and increase the ‘standardization gap’ between the end of your project and the availability of standards resulting from it.
Especially for Web standards, some particularities apply: Do not expect to be able to come with a photo-ready specification and get a stamp. This never happened so far in W3C. It is much easier to connect to existing communities than it would be to create your own community backing up your innovative request in some area. Getting contacts to the relevant community via a W3C Working Group is rather easy. It is sufficient to start communicating with the Working Group via the public communication channels that they are supposed to have.
Most plannings that are made have to be adjusted. The same goes for standardization and development. Regularly, creating consensus around an idea will take longer than expected. Trouble is that at some point in time the project is over and can not support the standardization activities anymore. Already in an early stage, partners should therefore determine the partners with the highest interest in standardization. It will be those who benefit the most out of the take up of the innovative idea in a specification. With those partners, the project should determine an emergency plan in case the standardization is taking on beyond the lifetime of the research project.
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Since the Internet revolution in the nineties, standardization has changed its face. There are new rules and new challenges. The installed base on the Web and on the Internet is so large that it takes more than one stakeholder to change things or to make things take off. At the same time, the border between «standardization» and industrial grouping is blurring. Some consortia do not even do specification development but e.g. care for a certain implementation.
Stakeholders try to go forum shopping to gain advantages for their own technology. This means that one technology may be seen in several specification developing organizations. This is due to competition behavior of industry players, but also du to competition between specification developing organizations (SDO). E.g. most traditional SDOs today have a committee around RFID. But only rarely, the effort is undertaken to make those different specifications with different scope and core solution work with each other. So to make a complex solution work, one has to do a lot of guesswork to glue different solutions together. In this context it is important to determine the leading SDO of one area. Whether an organization is leading can be determined by the level of take up of their technology and specifications in a specific area. For GRID, OGF and OASIS e.g. are still the first class venues. For some of the underlying protocols used, there is a split between W3C and OASIS. For the new challenge of metadata, the use of W3C's semantic web technologies is encouraged.
It is very important that a Project makes a list of all relevant standardization places in its area. Once this is done, the fora and organizations found have to be carefully scrutinized for relevance, neutrality, impact, speed etc.. It is equally important that the project partners evaluate the IPR policy of a certain forum and determine whether this is in line with their own consortium agreement.
How to make standardization a fun exercise and a success story
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A project that intends for project results to contribute to standards needs to view standardisation as a process that begins at the concept stage of a proposal, and continues throughout the entire life of the project, and often beyond. The mindset should be one of a programme that involves a sequence of actions to achieve a specific result, much like a research programme that passes through different phases starting with an initial concept and ultimately leads to development and dissemination of new technologies. There are several important project milestones within a project lifespan where standardisation should be considered:
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W3C produces successful specifications, but W3C is a complex standards body. It produces only few high value specifications. The scope is limited to the Web or the Semantic web. A good strategy is to connect to people that have already experience with W3C and help you understand the mechanics. The W3C Team is also there to help you understand what possibilities there are.
The easiest match is if a project or initiative can connect to existing work to influence it. Innovation in applied research sometimes needs just a small fix in a given specification. As long as this specification is under development, it is rather easy to drop thoughts. Many W3C Working Groups are public and even those reserved for Members only must have public communication channels to receive feedback and scrutiny from the world at large. Use those channels to connect to the community in your area. The Working Group will likely hear your suggestions and you may want to join that Working Group to influence further.
Even an integrated project alone is not big enough to trigger new work in W3C. If the area a project is working on is not yet dealt with in W3C and within the scope of W3C (mainly «The Web»), a new Working Group or Incubator Group must be created. In this case a project needs all partners being committed to make it happen. It is better to appear as many partners than it is to appear as one project. It makes the momentum behind a certain development more visible to potential partners and may generate their interest.
Projects can join
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See the Membership FAQ for the exact details
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This is talking about Patent Policy, copyright, re-use of data and the like.
Running for the edge
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On the one hand, standardization organizations can be of value to projects. But on the other hand, projects can also be of value for standardization.
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This presentation is available online
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Abstract
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Our long term goals are:
W3C has a great interest that cloud and grid computing will connect to the Web the right way. Semantic Web technologies liky OWL ontologies and RDF metadata for services are one of the very important tools to overcome current shortcomings in metadata representation in services. This presentation will give a very brief howto on connecting to the vibrant W3C community. This will allow projects to do the right thing and reach out to a world wide community.