Open standards should be developed openly
Equity, innovation, and community gardens
Imagine a community garden with abundant fruit and vegetables for anyone to come and pick and consume. Now imagine a factory creating standardised parts to be used by manufacturers. The two metaphors feel quite different, don’t they?
The first, the garden metaphor, feels welcoming. You can envisage suggestions being made about which fruit and vegetables to grow to meet the needs of the community. And it feels natural that people would be able to opt-in to come and work in the garden for the benefit of all.
The second, the factory metaphor, feels less welcoming. In fact, unless you’re an employee of the factory, or have been sanctioned for entry, then you don’t get to see how the standardised parts are made. And if you’re not a manufacturer, then why would you get a say in how they’re made?
Metaphors are imperfect tools for thought but do help us grasp at deeply-held assumptions about how groups of people should interact with one another. In WAO’s work with various organisations, we’ve found the garden metaphor comes up time and time again as one to strive towards. Too often, though, organisations treat people as ‘consumers’ within a ‘market’ — rather than community members within an ecosystem.
Standards are extremely important to our everyday modern lifestyles. They’re the reason that devices don’t explode when you plug them into electrical outlets; they’re the reason that you can go to shops and buy clothes and shoes that fit; they’re the reason you can visit any website using any web browser.
It’s important that experts help develop standards. For example, we want people who know a lot about electrical engineering designing standards for electrical outlets. But it’s no good having standards that no-one uses, or that they use begrudgingly. That’s why it’s crucial to have end-user input into standards development.
Different types of standards, of course, require different levels of input. If we’re talking about electrical wall sockets, there’s a level of mandating that applies: in this country, if you want to plug things in, it works like this. But when it comes to things that are international and have to work in a variety of contexts, then it’s important that standards aren’t limited to only what a small group of people are familiar with.
For people who have never really worked openly, who have always interacted within the confines of closed working groups (with people who look and talk a lot like them, come from similar backgrounds, and want similar things in life) end-user requests might come as a bit of a shock. Insiders might describe these requests as ‘unhelpful’ or dismiss the people themselves as ‘not understanding the bigger picture’.
The reason that the recent IMS debacle has rankled the Open Badges community so much is because of the stark contrast between the way that the standard was developed by Mozilla, compared to the way it is being stewarded by IMS. The only reason that the community have any insight into the development process, which is closed off to paying members, is because of a requirement from Mozilla that IMS retain an open repository.
At that repository, Kerri Lemoie has submitted a proposal to align Open Badges with the W3C standard for Verifiable Credentials. Unlike IMS working groups, anyone can turn up for W3C calls — as a number of Open Badges community members have done. The opposition to Kerri’s proposal by a faction of IMS members has not been explained clearly and much of the discussion is happening behind closed doors.
This is not how open standards should be developed. It might take time to develop standards in the open. You may have to deal with people different to you and that you don’t particularly understand or like. It’s also possible that you have to consider use cases outside your own experience. But in the end, bringing a wealth of diversity and experience to the table is the exact thing that brought Open Badges its initial success.
Western capitalist society conditions us to understand openness as a danger. However, as the Open Badges community (and indeed other Open Source communities) have shown time and time again, openness leads to innovation. We’re all here to help make standards better — for everyone, everywhere.
Returning to the factory metaphor, consumers don’t usually have a direct say in what is produced by manufacturers. That is in contrast to the community garden, where even those people who are unable to work the land can have a say in what is grown. Openness leads to equity.
Open standards should be developed openly because not enough people work to ensure that equity is central to innovation and development. We believe that openness is an attitude, and one which bears fruit over time from which everyone can benefit.
