Subject: Re: Internet standardisation remains unilateral

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 18:18:36 -0700 (GMT-07:00)

Hi -

>From: John Day <[email-masked]>
>Sent: Oct 23, 2013 7:55 AM
..
>Subject: Re: Internet standardisation remains unilateral
...
>Agreed that business interest is the primary driving factor and since 
>most vendors are in the developed world, that is where the 
>participation comes from.
>
>Every standards committee I have ever had contact with found it 
>difficult to get "user" participation,  Generally, those 
>organizations argue that the standards work was beyond what they saw 
>as their planning horizon.  Of course, this doesn't stop them from 
>complaining that they had to buy what the vendors produce as opposed 
>to what they might liked to have seen!  ;-)  But we all know how 
>management tends to think.  ;-)

My limited experience has been that this is upside-down from how
organizations were brought to the standardization trough.  If
there was management support, it tended to be because management
had been persuaded by some technical folk that participation
would make business sense.  Sometimes that persuasion was not
technical, but took the form of "if letting those engineers go
to three meetings a year will keep them from leaving us for
a competitor, it's a worthwhile expenditure."

In either case, there is a value proposition that is immediately
evident to the participant: brain candy, resume building,
cultivating contacts, or maybe even legitimate belief that
it's in the supporting organization's interest.  But in the
potential participant's mind those benefits need to outweigh
the personal and organizational cost of "persuading" management,
as well as the pain and anguish of working within a given
standardization forum.  The IETF is hard on people, and we
should not ignore the toll that it takes or the losses we
incur by driving folks away.

If users/workers from a given region have little leverage,
or if participation does little to advance their careers, or
if the financial or psychic cost of participation is too high,
we should not be surprised if they are not motivated to participate.

But this is all just guesswork until we learn *from*
*them* how participation could be made worth their while.

Randy