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RE: [xml-dev] ISO and the Standards Golden Hammer (was Re: [xml-d ev] Yo
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At 10:08 AM 5/1/2004 +0100, Paul Sumner Downey wrote:
Michael Kay wrote:
> But it's more open than the only alternative which
> is to hold 90% of your meetings in the same continent.
Agreed. A meeting in Palo Alto is 'international' to many on
this list. I suggest a standards body should consider holding
all its meetings in Mumbai since that's where most of the
development work seems to be headed or Antarctica since that's
equally inconvenient to all.
Just for the record... in my CNET interview that seems to have provoked
all this discussion the point I was making was that holding the meetings
all over the world didn't really help make the standards process more
open because it was effectively putting a travel budget hurdle in place
for all but the large firms. I said
" let's schedule my meetings every quarter and once in Tokyo and
once in Berlin and once in Vienna and once in Vancouver and once in
Washington"
and while I was just picking those cities at random I think that the
ebxml meetings were a good demonstration of that. (dates are from
memory).
San Jose (dec 99)
Brussels (mar 00)
San Jose (jun 00)
Tokyo (nov 00)
Vancouver (feb 01)
Vienna (may 01)
Holding the meetings all over the world undermined our progress, because
at each new city there would be a sizable group of new participants who
could come because it was local or nearly so. We'd spend a lot of
the time just getting them oriented. So while I can
appreciate Paul's argument for geographical diversity it comes with both
larger economic costs and at a tax on productivity. I
also recall that the reason for the "standards scandal" in the
NY Times earlier this year was that Microsoft was footing the bill for a
CEFACT road show to take the standards message around the world...
"for the purpose of making things more open."
bob glushko
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