Re: Standards Making 101 (was: Re: Tradehill Bitcoin exchange shut down for 2nd time in 2 years)

Manu, I shared your list of good practices for standards development &
maintenance with a colleague who's long been active with the IETF
"Michael Richardson" <mcr+ietf at sandelman.ca>.  He adds...

"I will add another important thing: the 1.0 has to anticipate the
upgrade to 2.0 and beyond."

On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 10:52 PM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
> On 09/09/2013 09:48 AM, Ricardo Varela wrote:
>> Some of the existing regulations are there to contemplate "use cases"
>> that some projects may not have had to face yet and I think its not
>> so wise to quickly disregard them all as "no longer relevant"
>
> +1
>
>> On that note: I think it's important to separate the different areas
>> in WebPayments that have to do with payment technologies, regulation,
>> and virtual currencies.
>
> +1
>
>> I don't see why we have such a zeal in linking all of those together.
>> Are we saying that there will be no WebPayments standard until we
>> have fully operational virtual currencies?
>
> Definitely not. I don't think anyone is saying that all of this stuff is
> linked together such that we can't make reasonable progress based on the
> practicalities of the regulatory environment today.
>
>> In the meantime, my opinion is that it would be good that at least
>> some parts of those web payments find their way to real users out
>> there, even if they have to be built over the "old" payment
>> infrastructures
>
> Yes, absolutely. As we've seen, even most of the virtual/alt currencies
> layer over the old payment infrastructure. That's going to be the way it
> is for decades to come.
>
> For those of you that are not familiar with the process of creating
> world standards, what Ricardo is getting at is very important to
> internalize.
>
> To make progress toward something that will be a world standard takes a
> tremendous amount of focused effort. You have to be practical about it,
> which means that only a handful of the things we're trying to address
> are going to be addressed in the 1.0 specifications. In general:
>
> Troubled standards:
>
> 1. Place design purity over practicality (XHTML2)
> 2. Don't have an active community behind them (GRDDL)
> 3. Are more complex than the task requires (SOAP)
> 4. Misunderstand the target audience (RDF/XML)
> 5. Try to do too much (WSDL)
> 6. Are created in the Working Group, w/ no industry feedback loop (P3P)
> 7. Has a timeline that is not restricted (XHTML2)
>
> Successful standards:
>
> 1. Are messy, but solve real problems in a pragmatic way (HTML5)
> 2. Have active communities behind them (CSS3)
> 3. Are simple, elegant, and reuse what works (JSON)
> 4. Understand the target audience (HTML5)
> 5. Are focused (PNG)
> 6. Are largely done by industry before a Working Group starts (JSON-LD)
> 7. Has a restricted timeline (less than 4 years) to hit 1.0 (JSON-LD)
>
> If what Ricardo is saying is that we should focus on the latter 6 items
> if we want the work that this group is doing to succeed, I couldn't
> agree more.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Meritora - Web payments commercial launch
> http://blog.meritora.com/launch/
>



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Received on Tuesday, 10 September 2013 13:38:45 UTC