Commons harmonization, interoperability, standards
Simon Grant
Public
Seen by 144
Several people here understand that interoperability, harmonization or standardization are vital aspects of commons collaboration, both in general, and in particular in the building of IT infrastructure. We invite ourselves and other interested people to tell us about their knowledge, experience and opinions about how to the commons can be helped towards better interoperability; and to work collaboratively together, first, to explore what agreements we can come to about actions that would be helpful; and second, where possible, to coordinate taking those actions.
There are cultural and behavioural dimensions to standardization, as there are to "commoning". We are open to exploring and sharing ideas on the attitudes, values, knowledge, skills and competence of people who wish to collaborate constructively on harmonization or standardization of the commons, and how to embody those values in our processes, which need to be transparent and open.
We welcome people with less experience of standardization, to ask questions about how these topics fit in with commons transition; about what has worked or could work; and to contribute their ideas around these topics.
Greg Cassel Sat 6 May 2017 1:50PM
So, do we mean "good, valuable standards only emerge through inclusive dialogue"?
That may be a more generally accurate statement. In fact I'd simply say that inclusive standards can only emerge through inclusive dialogue.
Standards have historically emerged via dialogue between specialists with varied attachments to academic communities and organizations, sometimes including for-profit corporations. We need not vilify the (unchangeable) past, and we also don't need to repeat it.
Having said that: I think that existing communications tools and techniques -- including discussion topics like this-- scale poorly to large diverse groups which have genuine common interests but also have many conflicting interests. So, I focus mostly on the nuts and bolts of how we communicate, while trying to participate usefully in a few of these discussions.
Paul B. Hartzog Wed 3 May 2017 2:15PM
Just want to share this. AVL Futures and UniteWNC are doing a lot of work around regional commons coordination these days. We discussed various examples (like OpenCollective, Enspiral, etc.) at our latest meeting.
https://medium.com/avl-futures/avl-futures-meetup-2017-04-29-cd9010354e6b
Rich and Nati from Enspiral/Loomio will be in Asheville at the end of May, so if anyone wants to come to our events, please let me know!
Bob Haugen Wed 3 May 2017 3:09PM
Looks like great things are happening in your neighborhood. Good that Greg will be there. Wish we could, too.
Paul B. Hartzog Thu 4 May 2017 3:09PM
No worries, I am meeting with some folks today to plan a futures conference for in the fall. Maybe you can come down then :-)
Greg Cassel Wed 3 May 2017 2:32PM
I expect to be at most (Wed-Fri) of the May 31-June 3 AVL Futures gathering which @paulbhartzog linked above.
Bob Haugen Sat 6 May 2017 6:31PM
I think standards will emerge from different organizations wanting to collaborate with one another. It is already happening. In those cases, for technical standards, I think the IETF motto fits: "rough consensus and running code".
https://www.ietf.org/tao.html
Simon Grant Mon 8 May 2017 8:36AM
I think many of us realise that the IETF (sometimes referred to as the Internet Society, its parent body) is one of the best players in technical standardization.
As a consequence, maybe we should be looking carefully at IETF process, and checking that it provides what we need. If it does, can we broaden it to non-internet related standards; and if not, can it be tweaked, either internally be persuasion or externally by setting up an even better body to deal with non-internet standards?
I'd really like to see a serious analysis of the IETF from a commons perspective. Is there one? Or do we have any academics who could suggest it as a student project?
Danyl Strype Wed 31 May 2017 1:39PM
"standards ... are never handed down from on high" -- but is this not the case with regulatory standards?
I think we need to be careful about how we define our terms here. I'm talking about technical standards for inter-operational systems, not social standards, not aesthetic standards etc. Also, I assume "standard" to mean "documentation of best practice according to a rough consensus of active practitioners", and not "legislation enforcing best practice", which is what I presume you mean by "regulatory standards".
Regulatory bodies (states and others) can certainly enforce technical standards, and in some cases it's seen as part of their core purpose (eg building standards, land use standards). But only the most naive or monomaniacal bureaucrat would have the hubris to think they could sit in their office and weave a technical standard from whole cloth, without consulting the technicians and organisations who will be asked to implement the standards.
While regulators can sometimes play a role in punishing rogue actors who refuse to take parts in public standards processes (eg anti-trust cases), technical standards usually emerge from a mutually beneficial desire to grow a sector (eg Elon Musk "opening" his electric car patents to grow that sector), and regulators normally limit themselves to enforcing aspects of the standards developed by practitioners, which relate to issues of public safety etc.
If it does, can we broaden it to non-internet related standards; and if not, can it be tweaked, either internally be persuasion or externally by setting up an even better body to deal with non-internet standards?
I favour the latter. Mission creep over-extends and kills good organisations, and is the raison d'être of bad ones. I look at organisations as a special case of software (complex instruction sets cluster processed by human computers), in which case how do we "open source" organisational code to increase "organisation freedom"? How do we spin up many instances of the "source code" of the IETF (or Open Source Ecology, or...) to create similar bodies for non-internet areas of technical standards?
EDIT: Typo. Edited paragraph 3 for clarity.
Bob Haugen Wed 31 May 2017 1:50PM
I'm talking about technical standards for inter-operational systems, not social standards,
A Commons is a form of social-economic organization. Interoperability between commons-oriented organizations will require standards for social-economic interactions that go pretty far beyond the purely technical. Those standards can take the form of agreements among collaborating organizations at first. If no collaborating commons-oriented organizations, then the standards don't matter anyway. Or if they are just collaborating in totally social ways (e.g. chat about ideas), standards still don't matter very much, unless they want to chat using some of the decentralized protocols that @strypey has been writing about.
Simon Grant · Sat 6 May 2017 3:13AM
Can, or should? What about e.g. OOXML? So, do we mean "good, valuable standards only emerge through inclusive dialogue"?
Same question to @strypey -- whose contributions I am enjoying and appreciating very much -- "standards ... are never handed down from on high" -- but is this not the case with regulatory standards?
I'd say we need to be careful to distinguish what actually happens from what we believe is good.