xml-dev - Re: sunshine and standards development

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

10/14/00 10:42:36 AM, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:

>Opening doors is difficult, and I certainly recognize that.  At the same 
time,
>it's hard to justify what looks from the outside like a deeply-held desire to
>shroud the decision-making process from the larger public it affects.

One of the problems here is that many of the W3C members are publicly-traded 
corporations, which means that published comments by their representatives 
have the potential to influence their companies' stock prices.  Fully opening 
up the process would actually stifle creativity because those WG members who 
represented publicly-traded companies would have to carefully consider every 
single statement they were to make from an investor-relations point of view, 
and would likely be under orders from top management to get clearance for 
anything of substance.  The result at best would be the injection of huge 
amounts of vapor into their submissions, and at worst would be companies 
withdrawing from the W3C process and not cooperating.  It's unpleasant that 
things have to be this way, but it's an example of the law of unintended 
consequences; what would appear to be an opening-up of the process would 
actually result in much of the membership becoming more close-mouthed and 
secretive.