Yesterday I filed a pro bono amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of the Federal Trade Commission's petition for writ of certiorari in its suit against Rambus Technologies.  I'm pleased to report that 19 standard setting organizations (SSOs), representing over 13,300 members, joined as amici curiae supporting this brief; the list of participants appears later in this blog entry.  As noted in the brief itself, these SSOs:

...represent a broad range of SSOs that participate in the standard setting process, and each is greatly concerned by the adverse effects that it anticipates will result from the [lower court reversal of the FTC's sanctions of Rambus].  Those effects will reach virtually all aspects of modern society, commerce, education and government, because all of these interests rely heavily upon the efficient development and broad adoption of standards by the private sector. 

The pervasiveness of standards, and of the potential reach of the decision on petition, is indicated by the range of focus of the amici curiae that have joined in this brief.  They include SSOs that develop standards or support standards development in sectors as diverse as defense, consumer electronics, photography, on-line learning, geospatial information, credit “smart" cards and a broad array of computer system products and services. 

The following piece is taken from the latest (October-November 2008) issue of my eJournal, Standards Today.  The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic.  For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.

The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. As discussed in the Editorial to this issue, unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. But, as examined in the Feature Article of this issue, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?

The following is an integrated suite of recommendations that could be implemented quickly and inexpensively, and without Congressional action. Of the ten proposals, the first is most urgent, as the advisors assembled in this step would provide the experience, guidance and active assistance needed to implement the recommendations that follow.

The following piece is the editorial in the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today.  The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic.  For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.

Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever. More than a year ago, he released a policy statement on technology and innovation that detailed his plans to employ state of the art technology to pursue a broad spectrum of goals, such as increasing national competitiveness, providing next-generation broadband access for all, creating a "transparent and connected democracy," decreasing health care costs, acting to prevent global warming, and lowering American dependence on foreign oil. In pursuit of these goals, he also promised to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer.

These are worthy and important goals. Like the other commendable promises the president-elect has made, they will be difficult to realize, for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious challenges include a crowded and ambitious agenda, the difficulties of achieving political consensus, and above all, the overarching urgency of addressing a global economic meltdown that demands attention above all else.

Certainly the concept of “one citizen, one vote” must be the bedrock upon which all democratic theory and protections are based.  Indeed, any government would presumably have to grant the validity of this tenet, lest its own validity be questioned.  After all, at the end of the day, when all else is stripped away, the debatable and the subjective, the polemical and the political, is this not the one undeniable standard upon which everyone must agree, the fundamental principle

Down through the millennia and even into the present, this simple, seemingly irrefutable standard of equality and representative government has proven to be almost impossible to establish in any democracy as a practical fact.

Although much of the brouhaha of the OOXML adoption process has abated, the post-partum process of reviewing how Joint Technical Committee One (JTC1), the ISO/IEC body that gave birth to both ISO/IEC 26300 (ODF) and OXMLISO/IEC IS 29500 (OOXML), continues.  More specifically, meetings continue to be held in which a variety of related matters are being considered, including the ongoing maintenance of each standard, and whether and how the Directives that control the deliberations of JTC1 committees might profitably be amended to address the concerns that arose during the consideration of these two overlapping document format standards.

Most recently, representatives of JTC1 and the SWG Directives committee met in Nara (JTC1) and Osaka (SWG), Japan to review these weighty matters.  As has been the case in the past, a variety of those directly involved in the ODF/OOXML saga wrote about the results of this latest meeting, including three bloggers who attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting that served as the climax of the OOXML adoptive process: Alex Brown, Rick Jelliffe and Tim Bray.  You can find their alternately contrapuntal and contrary observations here, here and here, respectively.  I did not attend the gathering in Nara, but I have read the recommendations made at that meeting (as well as Alex's, Rick's and Tim's commentaries on them), and ruminated a bit on the recommendations and the events that inspired them.  Here is my own sense of what others have also observed. 

If you hail from one of the hot beds of high tech - Silicon Valley, say, or (in my case) the Route 128/495 area of Massachusetts, you've doubtless heard the phrase "serial entrepreneur."  What those words describe is someone who has started several companies, and the phrase, when used, is invariably regarded as a compliment.  These days, if such a serial entrepreneur has some major successes under her belt, that makes her one of the elite of the high tech nobility - someone with the golden touch, that can turn ideas into huge returns for founders and investors alike.

But should this really be a compliment?

That may sound like a silly question, until you remember that in order to start a new company, you need to get rid of the old one - or at least leave it in someone else's care.  That isn't how the great companies of the past came to be what they are today, and it makes me wonder where we can look to find the great companies of tomorrow.

This is the latest in a series of occasional essays that I call The Monday Witness.  This series focuses on social rather than technical issues, for the reasons explained in the first entry in the series.  As always, the opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Election campaigns bring to mind - usually ruefully - standards of many types.  Among them are the levels of civility, truthfulness, and fair play that we wish candidates would exhibit when they compete for our votes.  But as the day of final electoral reckoning approaches, the gulf between the standards we favor and the conduct we observe on the hustings tends to widen rather than narrow.  To my mind, nothing demonstrates a lack of character in a candidate as the degree to which he or she is willing to slander an opponent.

Holding candidates accountable to reasonable standards of conduct and character in this respect has become more problematic of late, in part because candidates and their parties keep developing new ways to distance themselves from sordid practices, while still reveling in their results.  Some of these tactics have become sufficiently notorious to contribute new names to the lexicon of electoral dirty tricks.  The 2004 campaign, for example, gave us a new verb: to "Swiftboat," meaning to spread disinformation through an organization that has pretensions to credibility, and also denies any connection to the campaign of the candidate the disinformation assists.  The name, of course, derives from the ostensibly ad hoc association of war veterans that sought to impugn the war record of Democratic candidate John Kerry, a decorated Viet Nam war hero.  Most recently, we have a new adjective - "Rovian" - derived from the name of former Bush political mastermind Karl Rove.  This word is used to condemn (although sometimes with grudging admiration) conduct that is both artful and wrong - such as collaborating with Swiftboaters (yes, there is a noun form as well).