[OpenISO] openiso

[Norbert Bollow]

Hello everyone!

First let me say, welcome!  Thank you for joining this list!

I'll post an introduction etc in a couple of days, after perhaps
a few more people have joined us.  But there's been a good posting
that I'd liek to respond to right away.


Marc Ravensbergen <marc at shonetic.com> wrote:

> This sounds like a good idea... my concern though is that most
> organizations at some point in time are bounded by finance concerns,
> and will eventually fall to the highest bidder.

This is a very legitimate concern, once that we should very carefully
discuss to figure out how to make OpenISO.org as robust as possible
with regard to this kind of problem.

I think it will be unavoidable for OpenISO.org to be "bounded by
finance concerns" in the sense that how much OpenISO.org can do will
be limited by limitations of financial resources.

The question is how to prevent this from resulting in OpenISO.org
making corrupt decisions.

I'm pretty sure that OpenISO.org should be a foundation under Swiss
law, not an association or corporation.  A foundation cannot be
bought like a corporation can, and it cannot be easily taken over
by a horde of strawmen who become members.

In addition I think that as soon as OpenISO.org reaches a certain
size (a dozen employees?) there should be a kind of "Chinese Wall"
between those employees who work on soliciting donations and those
who work on resolving conflicts, so that the conflict resolution
work will not be influenced by knowledge about where the big
donations are coming from.  There should be a strict and strictly-
enforced rule that the employees of the OpenISO.org copnflict
resolution department will be informed only about how much money is
coming in for the various work-areas of OpenISO.org, but not about
who are the stakeholders who are making the donations.

Even if we cannot expect OpenISO.org to be so robust that there
would be a guarantee of it maintaining its integrity forever, let's
try to make it as robust as we can, so that OpenISO.org will remain
trustworthy for a long time.

But all that is still pretty far in the future.  Right now, this
OpenISO.org needs to get going as a project that generates some
useful standards evaluation and standardization work in a reasonably
objective manner.

> You could start by listing some various standards that are freely
> available on a page somewhere, with a rating system of some sort.

Yes, I agree with this idea.  We need to work out a set of criteria
upon which the recommendations of OpenISO.org will be based, while
at the same time trying our hand at applying these criteria to some
specifications which are "standards" in the eyes of at least some
people.

Here's a first proposal for a rating system:

* strongly discouraged  --  pseudo-standards with vendor lock-in
                            properties or negative impact on people
                            with disabilities

* discouraged           --  specifications which don't quite meet
                            the minimum requirements of an
                            OpenISO.org standard, but where adopting
                            them anyway is not likely to result in
                            significant harm

* acceptable            --  specifications which meet the minimum
                            requirements of an OpenISO.org standard,
                            but where there is nevertheless an
                            objective reason to avoid recommending
                            them.

* recommended           --  a good standard, fully worthy of
                            endorsement

* strongly recommended  --  an excellent standard without any known
                            technical shortcomings

Eventually, when the rating system and the underlying criteria have
stabilized, OpenISO.org could start issuing "OpenISO.org certified
standard" certifications, which would be available for standards
that are rated at least "acceptable".

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                    http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG  http://SIUG.ch