Re: FYI: What makes a standard ‘world class’?

> On 14. Aug 2021, at 14:43, Michael Herman (Trusted Digital Web) <mwherman@parallelspace.net> wrote:
> 
> Quoting…
>  
> What makes a standard ‘world class’?
>  
> It is not easy to say exactly what makes one standard better than another, but the following points are probably the most important:
>  • A world class standard should have well-defined objectives that respond to real needs in a timely manner.
>  • Its technical content should be complete and accurate.
>  • It should be easy to understand (or as easy as the subject matter allows!) and easy to implement.
>  • Its requirements should be expressed clearly and unambiguously.
>  • It should be validated.
>  • It should be well-maintained.

I would add

For a standard to be world class, that is for it to be deployable globally, 
and supported by competing nations, localities, power blocks, legal systems, etc… 
it has to be geo-politically correct. 

That is, it cannot assume a centre of control, a world policeman, a
unique agreement on truth, or one legal system. 

The two most successful geo-politically correct standards we have are:

  - the internet 
  - the web

The internet could not have been built without being of interest to 
the local telecoms of each nation to build out the infrastructure (though
it helped that the cold war had just ended), and it had to be of interest
to large multinationals that could lay the fibers across the oceans and
states to put satellites into space. It had military interest in that it
was designed to route around nuclear destruction. And so on… The fact that
the internet sends numbers from one computer to the other, was one way of
quieting the problem of content being sent around. 

Of course the same could be said of the Web, and the semantic web. They
allows any conceptualization and points of views to be expressed, by 
building on mathematical logic and theories of language. 

>  
> Reference: https://www.etsi.org/images/files/Brochures/AGuideToWritingWorldClassStandards.pdf

Thanks for the pointer.
>  
> I recommend that these 6 points be used as “exit criteria” for all W3C specifications/standards efforts.  For example, I don’t believe we have met this bar with the VC Data Model 1.0 specification (https://github.com/w3c/vc-data-model/issues/480#issuecomment-898876288).
>  
> Best regards,
> Michael Herman
> Far Left Self-Sovereignist
>  
> Self-Sovereign Blockchain Architect
> Trusted Digital Web
> Hyperonomy Digital Identity Lab
> Parallelspace Corporation
>  
> <image001.jpg>

Received on Monday, 16 August 2021 09:17:42 UTC