[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[John Day]

At 7:27 -0500 2011/02/18, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>Richard Bennett wrote:
>>People bring proposals to standards bodies, who choose among them, 
>>modify them, accept them and reject them. "Existing practices" in 
>>the most interesting cases are confined to the lab or even to 
>>simulation these days.
>
>Which is distinctly different than bottom-up in the IETF sense.  The 
>distinction isn't bottom-up vs. top-down, it's more one of 
>semi-collaborative, get it right ("rough consensus and running code" 
>so to speak) vs. vendor's battling out who's existing products will 
>have to be modified when the standard gets finalized.

That depends on how close they are when they start!  ;-)  It has 
nothing to do with the nature of the organizations.  The IETF has 
been fortunate in that many of their projects have been with people 
more or less on the same page.  Although in recent years that has 
changed considerably and I think you would find the politics within 
the IETF these days to come close to the level in the OSI.  (We are 
talking OSI here and not the wider environment of ISO.)

By putting the computer companies and the PTTs in the same meeting it 
was worse than oil and water, perhaps oil and gasoline!

Also it isn't just whose product has to change.  What was being 
proposed by OSI was completely counter to both IBM's and the PTT's 
business models.  Needless to say, they weren't going to take that 
lying down.

>
>>I think you're making a false distinction between OSI and other 
>>networking standards. OSI problem was mainly that it was not 
>>top-down enough, had too many cooks, and had to offer too many 
>>options to achieve consensus.
>And that comes back to the lack of a bottom-up process that 
>emphasized running code.  My impression of the OSI work was that it 
>was way too theoretical and political.

All standards are bottom up.  If participants don't choose to work on 
it, then it doesn't happen.

Since OSI participants was primarily corporations they were hesitant 
to commit money to implementation until they knew there was product. 
They didn't have the advantage of being government subsidized as the 
Internet did.

>
>There are real lessons to be learned here.  I see a lot of the same 
>dynamics in today's geospatial standards work through the OGC - 
>lot's of theoretical wrangling, resulting in standards that sort of 
>work, but have to be fixed in later revisions, and that largely get 
>ignored by most of the world (take a look at how many people use 
>ESRI's proprietary stuff, vs. Google's APIs, vs. OGC standard WMS 
>and WFS; or maybe look at the rapid adoption of RESTful intefaces 
>vs. W3C web service standards).

This is true of all standards organizations that have been around a 
long time.  Look at all the RFCs that are not in current use.

There are many lessons to be learned here.  The social dynamics of 
these processes is more than a little fascinating.

>
>--
>In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>In<fnord>  practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra