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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Anti-Ranti
 At 10:16 AM 3/13/00 -0500, DuCharme, Robert wrote: >Hopefully, Jon Bosak's recent actions to encourage Oasis participation will >reduce the volume of complaints. It reminds me of what I tell my wife when >she complains about the inefficiency of our daughter's soccer league or the >complainers at her church: it looks bad to complain too much about a >volunteer organization--at a certain point, people should pipe down or >volunteer themselves to improve things. The man who lead the drive to invent >XML wants to lead people to build a more democratic standards organization; >it will be interesting to see who heeds the call. While I was very glad to hear Jon Bosak's call for developers to participate in OASIS, I remained concerned about a tone I hear throughout discussions about such participation. This tone appears in the message above, and also in the end of Jon Bosak's XTech keynote - see http://xmlhack.com/read.php?item=310 for details. Perhaps it will be seen as merely more complaining, but I find it remarkable that these calls for more participation seems to be deeply intertwined with irritation that the processes by which they operate are questioned. The result is a remarkably condescending brew of "we're sick of your crap, and if you want us to take you seriously, you'd better get on board with our organization." Having seen this more than a few times, it starts to get pretty wearying. I'd like to suggest that the folks making such calls for participation focus on the positive aspects of what their organizations are up to, rather than castigating developers who haven't yet found a happy home in one standards organization or another. All of us have to deal with the results of standards development, whether or not we had a voice in their creation, so a certain level of complaining should be expected, perhaps even encouraged. There are a couple of very simple things that could be done to reduce the temperature of these discussions. I hope strongly that they will at least be taken as constructive criticism. For the standards-building consortia and other organizations: * stop talking, at least in public, about 'bozo fees' as if everyone who doesn't have $5000 or $250 dollars to pay for a seat at the table is some kind of idiot. * use carrots, not sticks, to encourage developers and larger organizations to join organizations. * respond regularly and publicly to discussions originating outside of the organization, and at all steps of the standards development process. * encourage developers whose interests may not be a perfect match with a particular organization's approach to work with other developers on projects that might meet their needs. * make as much of the decision-making process as possible public. * accept the existence of the market, and develop standards in light of the fact that there may be competition. I don't think any of the above is spectacularly difficult, though it definitely requires a change in mindset and rhetoric. Some of these are simple public relations, though all of them (except perhaps the first) have some real costs associated with them. Finally, as far as all the complaining developers go, there might be a few things we can do as well: * state disagreements politely in both public and private forums * work on projects we find useful, without focusing on whether standards organizations find them relevant. * find standards processes we like and support them. I'm working on XML MIME types through the IETF's process, for example, and I've enjoyed working on the SML-DEV list. * comment on specific proposals when possible, using forums like the W3C lists. While this can be discouraging - responses are sometimes few and far between - it's frequently worth doing and can occasionally yield real results. Hopefully, this all will sound fairly reasonable, and won't be treated as just more complaining. Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. Building XML Applications Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth http://www.simonstl.com *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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