This editorial appeared in the `Communications of the ACM' in August 1993 on pages 11-12. The Power of Standards Anthony Gargaro, Roy Rada*, James Moore, George S Carson, Joe DeBlasi, David Emery, Chris Haynes, John Klensin, Irving Montanez, Eugene Spafford The vision of the ACM Technical Standards Committee is to empower ACM members -- as individual technical experts -- so that they can actively participate in the standards making process. It serves the ACM membership through its Special Interest Groups so as to provide more information about standards and to help the membership appreciate the impact of standards. While particularly prominent users of standards are software engineers and those who purchase systems, the entire ACM membership is ultimately affected by standards. Background Standards are often important for the success of commercial ventures or, more generally, for the spread of technology. The range of items that have been standardized is awesome. Standards are intended to facilitate connection among components, whether those components be machine parts or people. How do standards get created? Who influences the process? Overall one might note that the standard making process involves many different groups whose mode of operation is a complex combination of commerce and government. An advanced country tends to have at least one major standards institute. The United States has the American National Standards Institute, the United Kingdom has the British Standards Institute, and so on. An alliance of European nations has formed to create a supranational standards organization called the Committee of European Normalization which receives input from 12 European countries. The International Standards Organization is the premiere international standards body. In addition to the national and supranational organizations, many other commercial and volunteer groups play important roles in developing standards. For instance, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers sponsors the development of numerous standards through the work of volunteers . The essential characteristic of the standards process is that people must agree to a standard. An average person can get tuned to the flow of standards work and have an opportunity to comment on standards of interest at an early enough time to perhaps influence their final form. But membership in standards working groups is a resource-demanding process. In this way, people with the backing of large organizations have a greater likelihood of being able to influence the standards process than people working independently. Given the importance of standards in computing and the complexity of the standards process, ACM is attempting to provide a unique service to its membership in the domain of standards. ACM has recently inaugurated a magazine entitled StandardView whose sole topic is standards. ACM is an international society whose members can appreciate the global connectivity which computers support; the new ACM offices in Brussels are near the headquarters of the Committee of European Normalization. The opportunities for global perspectives on standards are heightened by the connectivity of ACM members through the new electronic bulletin boards which the ACM Special Interest Groups are maintaining. Problem The vision to promote the dissemination and understanding of standards-related information responds to the concern of ACM members that such information is lacking. One view is that standards are more and more developed by closed industry consortia motivated to create unnecessary markets. In this view, the world of standards is one of chaos because too many standards appear which disagree with one another, and the process by which standards are developed is kept secret from the majority of standards users. From this perspective one might wish to reduce the number of standards, to assure that their coverage was non-overlapping, and to enforce one consistent process for the development of standards. But while these concerns validly represent one view of reality, another view is that - The large number of standards may be explainable by the rapid growth of information technology. - Standards intended for different usages or different communities may naturally conflict at their edges. This disagreement may be viewed as a sign of the rich variety of needs in the domain to which the standards are applied. - In one abstract sense, the standards process is very orderly because of its universal emphasis upon procedure. Whether one takes the view that the standards world is chaotic or orderly, broad agreement might be reached on the concerns that appropriate technologies are standardized and that standards are approved only after review by the appropriate audiences. Solution Information about standards should be disseminated as widely as possible. This information should make clear to users what the content of the standards is as well as how the standards are being developed. Users might then better appreciate that standards are living things which depend on the contributions of users and in turn are intended to make the work of users easier. As the dissemination of information should empower users to give feedback at critical junctures, this feedback should be well-informed. ACM should make a major commitment to educating people about the differences among standards and the impact of these standards. In general, the educational aspect of standards has been inadequately addressed in the past. From this vision of informing the ACM membership about standards, objectives can be derived, such as to: - educate members about standards and the standards making process; - funnel member input into requirements for new standards development; - develop procedures whereby effective and broad public review of information technology standards can occur; and - develop procedures to increase the availability of specialized information technology knowledge from ACM members to standards committees so that the quality of standards might be improved. The Technical Standards Committee will support education and training about standards and the standards process. Specific mechanisms for the dissemination of standards information include the use of electronic mail filtering. Newsgroups on the electronic networks can be targeted for standards information relevant to that newsgroup. Conferences or workshops within conferences can focus on standards. To effectively pass information to ACM members and in turn to focus the ACM member response to the standards making-bodies, the Technical Standards Committee will need to coordinate all official ACM participation in standards-related activities. This shall include designation of ACM memberships and liaisons in standards-related organizations; and development of policy and procedures for ACM participation in standards-related activities. In this same vein, the Technical Standards Committee will encourage and coordinate individual Special Interest Group standards-related activities. ACM members, be they developers or users of information technology, typically must coordinate their work with other people. Coordination depends in the first instance on a common language among those who work together. This common language in the information technology world depends on standards. The new ACM Technical Standards Committee intends to improve the access to and review of standards for ACM members. * Author for correspondence: Professor Roy Rada Department of Computer Science University of Liverpool Liverpool L69 3BX, England