Introduction

Despite the heavy-hitters on this panel, the session was very poorly attended. The moderator also didn’t do a very good job of keeping it focused or directed, so it was basically a free-for-all with many of the panelists bickering for the whole panel. At one point, Hammer-Lahav even walked off stage into the audience to ask a question! Short story, effective moderation is key to a good panel discussion, and without it, it’s basically crap.

That being said, I did take a few notes, so here they are for your enjoyment.

Overview

Many of the most interesting new formats on the web are being developed outside the traditional standards process; Microformats, OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and originally Jabber – four out of five of these popular new specs have been standardized by the IETF, OASIS, or W3C. But real hackers are bringing their implementations to projects ranging from open source apps all the way up to the largest companies in the technology industry. While formal standards bodies still exist, their role is changing as open source communities are able to develop specifications, build working code, and promote it to the world.It isn’t that these communities don’t see the value in formal standardization, but rather that their needs are different than what formal standards bodies have traditionally offered. They care about ensuring that their technologies are freely implementable and are built and used by a diverse community where anyone can participate based on merit and not dollars. At OSCON last year, the Open Web Foundation was announced to create a new style of organization that helps these communities develop open specifications for the web. This panel brings together community leaders from these technologies to discuss the “why” behind the Open Web Foundation and how they see standards bodies needing to evolve to match lightweight community driven open specifications for the web.

The Panel

• David Recordon – Six Apart Ltd
• Dawn Foster – Fast Wonder
• Eran Hammer-Lahav – Yahoo!
• David Rudin – Microsoft
• Dare Obasanjo – Microsoft

Moderator Questions

Question: Facebook Connect vs. OpenID… what’s better?

(Recordon) As long as communities are willing to say that a user experience sucks, we can figure out how to add that idea to the stack.

(Hammer-Lahav) I’m going to go out on a libm. Generally, standardization is there for taking market away from a market leader. The thing about Facebook Connect and OpenID is that it’s too early to say “OpenID is the winner”. OpenID may need a swift kick in the ass. On the other hand, Facebook hasn’t been a good community member either, because they haven’t listened much to their community. So, I’d like to see both of these developed independently, because communication is good.

(Recordon) There’s plenty of evidence that no solution will stand if it doesn’t continue to innovate. So OpenID may be to be blamed for not having innovated enough, and Facebook came along.

(Rudin) One of the main points that I’m taking… ultimately, standards aren’t the be-all and end-all of all technology. It’s just like any other piece of technology, and needs to stand on its own and stand up to the competition. We can’t just say “we’ve made the standard, and it’s done” because the world is full of standards that no one uses. That’s because there’s a marketplace out there that layers on top of standards. What you end up with is something that may not be the most technically elegant, or may not be the best solution. Competition is alive and well, and it’s important that the competition continues.

Question: Is evolving standards body going to push some other technologies into extinction?

(Hammer-Lahav) The good thing is that we scared the shit out of the standards bodies, and we started getting calls from people high up in the organizations. I’m telling them… hey if no one wants to bring their stuff to you, it’s because no one cares. If you start a highly opinionated group of 60 people, you won’t get anywhere. What you need is a “benevolent dictatorship model” where someone will lead it. You need more than goodwill to get people to agree.

(Rudin) We’ve got this situation where standard bodies have become complicated over time. So the open web initiative is starting a clean slate, but it will never replace something like ISO or other international standards, where you need help from the government, or telecom standards. So it’s really a matter of all the efforts can live side by side.

(Recordon) Are they there because they want to be there or are they being forced tobe there? How are open standards used for a competitive advantage? Establishing a base layer to build on top of it is different than a situation where it’s contentious and not everyone wants to be at the table.

(Rudin) A serious problem… if you’ve got multiple parties, like RSS, how are you going to change that? Frankly, this type of issue can make or break a standard. Competition is often times why the standards end up kind of long and complicated.

(Hammer-Lahav) Lots of good arguments for not working through standards bodies… they are expensive, inefficient, monopolized by a small group of opinionated people. It’s turned into a big mess. At the IDF, it’s a really fucked up organization. They vote by humming.

(Rudin) Humming is a great example of how these things evolve. The whole idea is that people hum, and they wanted a way for people to be able to vote without having to vote against their boss. So it’s a political process, and fascinating example of why certain processes evolve. There’s a certain method to the madness.

(Recordon) I think that’s bullshit. There is more value in being present rather than being on IRC.

(Obasanjo) How is this different that the open standards community? Is your model a good model?

(Hammer-Lahav) I think it is a good model. Any monkey with a keyword can start a process. But they couldn’t establish a consensus. People ask me… why are you blogging so negatively about OpenID when you are working on it?

Audience Questions

Question: There’s a lot of discussion about anti-patterns. What’s our model for a well implemented process?

(Obasanjo) One of the best patterns for open standards is too make sure that you have a problem that many people have tried to solve, but they don’t all solve it in the same way, that means there’s a body of work you can learn from. Good counter examples to that if you look at all the XML standards, there’s too much invention.

(Recordon) Companies having half a dozen if not more implementations is a problem. Another good idea is having all of the discussions on the mailing list. Make all of your decisions in public, and make everyone accountable for what they do and say.

(Rudin) I’m not sure I agree with that. That’s one size fits all idea. As you go into bigger more complicated standards, you have ways to resolve conflicts, etc. You go up to international level, it’s not just individuals voting, it’s countries voting. And people represent it. A small group of people comes up with a country’s position, and they vote on that. So I don’t think there’s any one way to do it. It all just depends.

(Hammer-Lahav) 300 years of American political evolution has still failed to produce an efficient model for common consent. People by definition are not animals that tend to fall in line. It really depends on who the personalities are in the room. You have to accommodate people’s personalities. “Making standards is really like making sausage”. You don’t want to know what’s going in there.

(Rudin) Why the hell is Microsoft here? We don’t want to waste our resources, that’s why we’re here. What we’re trying to do with the Open Web Foundation is make sure that there aren’t problems up front. At least with scoping up front, we don’t know exactly where we’re going, but we all agree we’re trying to go in a given direction.

Question: What can we do to prevent the proliferation of specs bodies?

(Hammer-Lahav) I don’t think we really have a good one. It’s hard to have an open conversation about this. But truly, we need a good one, and so far we haven’t seen one. On the standards side of the world, licensing is a mess. It’s the Microsoft lawyer that is getting us closest to this right now. You don’t want to need to hire an IP lawyer to understand what a license means.

(Recordon) For big companies, for every specification project we need to understand how these things work.

(Rudin) With most standards, you don’t get the licesne to include most standards.

Question (Hammer-Lahav from the audience) You’ve been really vocal about being against the open foundation. How do you feel now that you’ve seen where people go. Did it make you feel better about it, do you still think it’s a stupid idea. What?

(Obasanjo) You are already pointing out some of the problems with open source specifications. Based on my experiences, I’ve really loved the IETF process.

Question: The questions I wanted to push back on particularly is … what we found during performance process is… blah blah blah. What we need is to take a middle ground which is to find the practices that we can converge, and do that.