1. Roll your own standards body

    Theresa O’Connor

    slides: https://tess.oconnor.cx/2006/11/BarCamp-LA/

  2. To help enable ad-hoc organizations to

    • form
    • deliberate
    • get results

    without getting bogged down in politics, personalities, or process

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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.

  8. Adapt existing, working process

    • incremental change
    • pave the cow paths
    • look to history

  9. 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

  10. 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.

  11. 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 19th / early 20th centuries

  14. </historical>

    • fluid membership
      • how do you handle voting?
    • geographically distributed
    • powerful tools
      • email
      • wiki
      • IRC

  15. Turns out, there’s already a deliberative process (that we can crib from) which takes these into account!

  16. 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

  17. 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

  18. Analagous to design patterns as programming language failure

    (16 of the 23 patterns in GoF unnecessary in Lisp — Norvig)

  19. 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



  20. Let’s templatize the IETF process like Cushing and Robert templatized parliamentary procedue

  21. Thanks!