Moderated Sign Up for Consortia Membership – Ensuring Compliance with Policies and Best Practices

David White, Vice President, Kavi Corporation

1/01/2005

Standards setting organizations are, by necessity, increasing the degree of formality they observe around policies and procedures that mandate conformance to antitrust laws and protect and articulate the organization's intellectual property rights policy. This paper summarizes the issues relating to the rights and obligations of membership in technology standards consortia and their implications for operations. It also offers a strategy for designing and implementing a sign-up process that ensures that new members have agreed to abide by anti-trust laws, the organization's bylaws, IPR policy and membership policies before they can log in to the organization's private web site and begin to participate in activities that are governed by written policies. This document then describes the process for administering that system for the benefit and protection of the organization and its members.