Thank you, thank you for having me and also thank you very much for staying until
so late on the last day of fasting.
So this session is called the effective standard setting and I'm sorry this is going
to be a bit rough as I start but you know the question is why this title and the reason
for this title is the current ESO process as well they're not very effective to put it
mildly right there's slow they fail to involve the main experts and the standards they
produce are unshit for purpose more often than not and this could sound like this
gruntled open source community person renting but it's actually not my words it's
literally what the report from the commission based on the you know the ESO's own
research shows right and you know if you want to dig into it you can most of my
comments were based on 0.311 page 19 but the purpose of this talk is not to do
standard organization bashing it's to propose an effective alternative and I have talked
about the reason why the ESO's function the way they do in their history and the
past and I know and I understand the context and I'm you're more than happy to
go look at that talk if you want a sort of more understanding perspective on
the situation but really the purpose of this talk is to try to figure out how
could we do this more effectively and we actually just had the premises of a
demonstration of that was the process that Etsy has put in place for the
vertical standards of the CRA which are clearly going in a direction that
essentially I'm going to be going to be talking about so the good news is actually
effective standard setting is fairly easy and we actually already have a model
for effective open collaboration at scale. Ta da it's just open source and you know
there's sort of pushback I get whenever I say this as oh but Toby you know
like a standard it's very different like it doesn't work that way at all we
cannot do this for lots of reasons reasons reasons but a number of
consortiums whose standards and specifications we all rely on
economic W3C etc have been using techniques like this for over a decade at
this point and it works really well and they publish regularly you know
increasingly rapid pace standards and specs that we all depend on and that
our technology depends on so yeah it works try it right and so how exactly
does it work well essentially as we were seeing before you put specs and as
text files on markdown files in publicly available code repositories and then
you just use issue trackers and four requests to track comments and manage
contributions so you can already see the difference between the Etsy model or
just presented it and the way the open source works is you know with this
model you can actually make proposals right the editor reporter operates
essentially like a maintainer and you want to go into the governance of what
that means in a few seconds and what is really really important is asynchronous
communication right for those of us that were involved in the sense that
like horizontal standard work essentially having to sit through three days of
meeting to be sure that you would not miss the moment where your comment would
be addressed but then still missed it is incredibly painful and it doesn't
make any sense and also cuts out a lot of people that do not have the
luxury to have more organizations willing to pay for them to sit in a
meaning for three days so you know asynchronous communication is really
important and then of course what you need and again that is not rocket science
either or IPR models that allow for this open collaboration model and then
allow you to close down a final version that cannot be that cannot lead to
their derivative work so that people can trust that that standard is the
one that was reviewed and approved by the consortium organization and not a
fork of it that would have a few things modified so again like this isn't
practice like it exists right this model works. What's really important and
what changes from the models that we see in the ESOs is that the drafting
and the review are open right you start from the get go essentially was an
empty page or perhaps an initial contribution and all of the drafting happens
in public and you have you get as a result early feedback and use cases that
feed into the standard work itself and then you get continuous reviewing the
whole drafting phase. So depending on the organizations you have that have
adopted the system and depending on what you need or you can have you can be
very flexible and creative with the governance. As an example some for example what
we G uses a concept called living standards where they're essentially always
contributing to a standard that is never finished. The idea is the standard
reflects the interoperability of the ecosystem and is updated continuously.
Full legal reasons they publish on a regular time a sort of like a version
copy of it to trigger IP our commitments from the broader industry but the
standard itself is just constantly living. On the other hand at the opposite
of the spectrum you can leverage the exact same system for the drafting phase
and then have very formal review process and that's actually used for example
to move standards built in these consortiums to ISO and make them
international standards in the process. You can have very different forms of
consensus mechanisms do. You can empower maintainers of reporters to essentially
be driving the standard and have a good sense of what the consensus is
going to be and put that in the draft. Or you can rely on meeting points or
poor request reviews in order to make sure that a change to draft is approved by
a majority of the group or by any kind of means that you would like to set up.
And yeah as I was saying you can absolutely add form a review process before
publication etc. And so why does that work? Well it makes it just
easy for everyone to participate. As an example during the early phase of the
work project we were working on a proposed spec and I had concerns about
one part of the spec that felt like it was going a little bit too broadly in one
area and I bumped into the main experts of that particular aspect at a
conference and literally tagged them on the draft the issue and they had to look
the next day and they told me oh yeah that wouldn't work for us they would
create this in this issue. So and essentially less than 24 hours I could get
effective useful feedback directly in the document itself and be able to
iterate over it. And it allows earlier involvement right you can get key stakeholders
in the process at a very early stage and provide use cases and tell you what
works and what doesn't what already exist in that feeling what doesn't. As I
was saying it in the bills easier involvement of the main experts and then
lastly I mean you're getting much much better tooling to manage common
synchronism. I mean I I'm still on a bunch of groups that talk about
since I'm like an Etsy and I kind of feel like half of me chuckles to be
fair and the other half of me really feels sincere pain for the poor
repertoire is who are dealing with thousands of comments that they have to
integrate and figure out like whether they conflict or not because the tooling is
so bad for us right if you're building on top of tooling that's been used and
we'll find for decades to manage code mergers and it is really easy to do
those. And I think that's all I have and I can now take a bunch of questions and
get thrown tomatoes at. Thank you very much for having me.
Hi, so thank you very much for this explanation. I would have left for
for example IETF's and the station to be the way you describe it where people
are eagerly do in fighting on how to manage the documents so comment
resolution and IETF is also sometimes not fun on the other hand for example
looking at the Etsy where some of the standards for U.S.R. are managing the
public GitLab instance and you can set pull requests and they are written
mark down. So I think the reality check is you'll would love it ideal word
however there's no single standards arc which even has that so do you
recommend more for example IETF to move more into the exit direction of
having everything in the GitLab or is that not intentional.
So I actually I'm not super familiar with how ITF works because I'm mostly
I've been more involved with W3C and ECMA than ITF and my understanding is
ITF is very flexible in terms of tooling and different communities they
are used different things but I must say I can't really talk for them.
I'm not sure I the sound is terrible I don't know if you can actually if you're
on the sort anything I said but like the questions are just really a
point to even understand from here so I'm not sure I understood your question
well and answered it properly.
Yeah so I think one of the things which you made a very good point of is that
we need batch of preparation tools and pretty much every standards process
breaks down and I think you outlined some very good ideas we just need to make
sure they are applied everywhere and I think that's the benefit of your great
benefit of your talk you've point out how to improve tooling in a way which makes
people not unhappy but productive.
Yeah thank you very much for that.
Thank you.
I think I'll get you all to you because I know all to me Simon wants to exercise.
I have to get what's that count up.
Thank you very much.
Ultramodic and from it yeah thank you.
Actually it's very interesting question.
It was on and it stopped okay yes ultimately again from it's very interesting
what you're presenting thank you very much I agree with about 90% of what you've
said and it's true that from the very beginning when I started looking in detail
an open source I realized that actually the open source community their ways of
working the spirit behind it was not actually very different from the world
of standards and the tooling is different that's for sure but the idea that
everybody works together to build something that is collectively better by
working together and delivering it publicly that's more or less the same spirit
the spirit of collaboration it's there there is one thing I would have an
issue with and that's you statement at the beginning of standards are slow that
depends on where you look one of the biggest delays in writing standards
and has been the case with the CRA standards has been the time it takes to get
consensus the time it takes to get input and to get that input agreed in the
committee that's what takes time the actual editing and what not that's
mechanical yes it's expensive it can be time consuming and annoying but that's
not where the delay is the delay isn't getting consensus we among other
things develop the standards for the mobile communications the 3G 4G 5G and
soon 6G we do it collaboratively with other standards bodies in the world
at the moment we're assembling all of the technologies that will go into
6G in what we call study items in a third generation partnership project by
in mid twenty twenty seven we will start writing the standards for 6G in about
two two and a half years we were right about fifteen hundred standards some of
them up to a thousand pages long describing the entire 6G system we'd have
about seven or eight hundred companies organizations involved in that
probably about two or three thousand experts sometimes a thousand people in
the room going through a thousand two thousand documents per week doing all
of that online we've tried it very difficult to get consensus across
a thousand people in an online session and in the time frame that we need to
move so you know we're going to move very fast with this when those standards
are delivered they're updated four times a year with again thousands of
changes tracking what actually happens in the mobile systems so there are
parts of standardization that are very slow that's true there are parts that
can move much faster than anything we've we're used to seeing even in the
open source work yeah no I mean I you know I entirely I entirely here to
point and I mean just to be clear like I'm literally quoting from a report
that is the commission's work it like I have you know and based on like
so I'm not making a statement here of my perspective on it and they're I
also don't want to suggest that there was a one-size-fits-all solution but
clearly my experience of at least a synthetic work and I'm around the
series I'm very honestly not familiar was how the Etsy one went because I
was not in the rooms but that was like really not great to put it mildly
and and I think the process used there is not adapted to the kind of standard
that it's supposed to be I don't know how to tell you know the telcomes industry
works and I don't know how they build standards and it's also very different
because it's a structure that as far as I know there's a lot of IP involved in
the standard processes and the structure is it's very different so it's totally
normal that four some solutions some systems work and for others others are
better and I think it's good when we can use the right tools for the job so yeah
thank you for your content I'm kind of thinking about how this oh sorry I'm
Daniel Aaronberg working as a vertical rapture for browsers in Etsy and I'm
wondering about how this recommendation about tooling and processes seem I'm
wondering about how we can the the European structures we we have these various
kind of comment periods as large it's been to early in the there's kind of this
initial open period and then there's this these other official like public
degree periods I think it it could be interesting to figure out how we could
map those to the the kind of open source process as you continuously have comments
coming in and you're continuously resolving them which kind of it's the you know
seek large comment review processes I'm not sure how we could adapt one to the
other but they're they're like trying to estimate so yeah sure should I go
to yeah okay so I don't know the specifics of how the process of at sea
works and when there's you know specific review a period etc the whole idea of the
way standards that are built on using an open source source collaboration model
are done is that you can still add like formal review periods when you want to
at the end of the process right but you start with the review process from the
get-go because everything is in the open and the benefit of that is you essentially
like you know the the whole comments they come like over a much longer period of
time and you can tune the document as you're getting input rather than do a
draft sort of kind of by yourself because I mean you know the reality of how
these standards are of written it's kind of like there's a reporter and like
they do most of the work right and and then once you've done most of the
work then get yelled at by lots of different people that are unhappy was it
and have to sort of like scramble to get that together right so essentially you
get yelled at less but for much longer period of time I don't know if the IPRs
you know the the process structure of at sea would allow for this but if it
did it would be great I told you hello presentation so I will be very brief
I'm aware of time so I'm Lucie Landrie yes we can introduce myself from
Cincinnati actually I took a picture from a presentation it was something I
loved rules should be designed to ensure force rule roll as a public good
as a central infrastructure and I think in the standards culture we are
a little bit far from there from being there from understanding the importance of
force and I loved all of your ideas for how to work together but so you
think also the lack of awareness sometimes or maybe not yeah that also takes
a place a role in a contribution start taking into account I'm sorry I missed
the last bit of that and it's not nice if you know if you thought maybe it
was also possible that the lack of awareness from stakeholders may
contributions difficult to be taken to account doing working-grabbed
discussions I'm not sure I understood the I'm so sorry Lucie awareness of how
important force is for as a critical infrastructure for all yes yes yeah so
this is this is yes so now I'm much more than the same
comment yes and this is precisely why if you do things in the open you kind of
like get this input and this feedback earlier on and it's kind of more obvious
right like if you have lots of people that are bringing sort of like technical
arguments to the table to you know for one way or another it makes it a lot easier
to you know like see them and then address them and so in closing thank you
all for your comments very much so I really hope that we're able to get
processes that work better for everyone and hopefully you didn't take those
comments to badly and I'm more than happy to work with you all to you know
help move this forward thank you very much folks