Completing The Consortium Standards Development Infrastructure

Twenty years ago, the IT industry decided that a standards infrastructure built to develop standards for the physical world was inadequate to meet its needs, and created a new type of organization to do the job. But it stopped short of forming a global organization to support these organizations and to maximize their value. It's time now to finish the ...

The role of the traditional global standards organization has been to adopt standards that have been found to be of acceptable technical quality to those National Bodies with an interest in the subject matter. In the modern world of information and communications technology, new types of certifications for standards development organizations themselves are needed, developed and administered by a new ...

The consideration of Microsoft's OOXML specification as an ISO/IEC standard has been marred by reports of multiple abuses and gambits, including the last minute upgrading of memberships in SC 34, the ISO/IEC JTC 1 committee with control over the process. After the voting period closed, life should have gotten back to normal. It didn't.

The criminal justice system in the United States guarantees the defendant the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty — an honorable standard for a society to uphold, to be sure. The problem is that life is rarely so black and white, and the victim is the integrity of the system.

With the explosion of cable and Web-based media channels of all sorts, there are news feeds to suit every political belief and bias. The result is less neutrality in reporting, more pandering to viewer tastes, greater polarization between those on the left and right, and an increasing feeling of helplessness. What can one person do?

Perhaps the oldest standards of all are words — abstract sounds to which we assign specific meanings. Laws rely on words retaining their meanings over time, or laws lose.