Roll your own standards body

Roll your own standards body

Edward O’Connor

slides: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2006/11/BarCamp-LA/
To help enable ad-hoc organizations to
- form
- deliberate
- get results
without getting bogged down in politics, personalities, or process
- microformats
- OpenID
- WHAT WG
- WSGI
- etc…
Lightweight organizations
- narrower interest and less formal than more traditional W3C/ISO-like standards
- wider interest and more formal than individual activity
- collaborating online — F2F rare if at all
- arbitrary, ad-hoc participation via mailing lists, wikis, IRC
Origins in process failures
- Many such organizations started by people fed up with process of bigger standards body (e.g., W3C → WHAT WG)
- Standardizing things within a smaller community than the bigger bodies (e.g. wsgi.org v. PEPs)
- By ditching heavyweight process, often left with no process at all
BDFL as substitute for process

[WHAT WG] has a very well defined process… I listen to people, I make a decision, I publish, rinse, repeat.

— Hixie, in #microformats
Sure, but…
- BDFL doesn’t scale
- What if the BDFL gets hit by a bus?
- BDFLs whom everyone can trust are few and far between
- etc.
Adapt existing, working process
- incremental change
- pave the cow paths
- look to history
Historical deliberation
- Our historical solution to the deliberative assembly problem:
  - parliamentary procedure
- evolved over time, unplanned
- weird, “lumpy” rules optimized for conflict minimization
- developed from precedent recorded in the Journal of the House of Commons
Origins in precedent
- One subject at a time: 1581.
- Alternation between opposite points of view in assignment of the floor: 1592.
- Requirement that the chair always call for the negative vote: 1604.
- Decorum and avoidance of personalities in debate: 1604.
- Confinement of debate to the merits of the pending question: 1610.
Adapting parliamentary rules

Templatization of parliamentary procedure in America
- Jefferson’s Manual
- Cushing’s Manual — first for non-legislative bodies
- Robert’s Rules of Order — widely adopted by many organizations
- Non-legislative deliberative assemblies have different needs
- same underlying principles of deliberation
  - fairness in debate
  - respect for minority opinion
    - including opinion of non-present members
- Loosening of rules
  - e.g. flexible quorum
- Robert became a widely-adopted portable template for how organizations could be fairly run
- Significantly contributed to the flowering of civic organizations in the late 19^th / early 20^th centuries
</historical>
- fluid membership
  - how do you handle voting?
- geographically distributed
- powerful tools
  - email
  - wiki
  - IRC
Turns out, there’s already a deliberative process (that we can crib from) which takes these into account!
The IETF process — RFC 2026
- IETF & WG Membership — whoever shows up
- No voting! — rough consensus & running code
We’re the people who make the GODDAMN INTERNET RUN!! If it weren’t for us, you’d be drooling in your laps instead of on your keyboards.

— Darrell Fuhriman
Technology → less process
- One subject at a time: N/A (separate mailing list threads)
- Alternation between points of view: ditto
- Decorum in debate: (mailing list etiquette, WG chair’s role as ML moderator)
- Confinement of debate to the merits of the pending question: ditto
- Requirement that the chair always call for the negative: in F2Fs, both positive and negative hums
Analagous to design patterns as programming language failure

(16 of the 23 patterns in GoF unnecessary in Lisp — Norvig)
The IETF's process' rules are very different from parliamentary procedure

But the underlying principles are the same

Solving the same problem in a modern context
Let’s templatize the IETF process like Cushing and Robert templatized parliamentary procedue
Thanks!
- slides: http://edward.oconnor.cx/2006/11/BarCamp-LA/