[ih] NIC, InterNIC, and Modelling Administration

[Miles Fidelman]

John Day wrote:
> At 7:27 -0500 2011/02/18, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> 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.)
> All standards are bottom up.  If participants don't choose to work on 
> it, then it doesn't happen.
That's true whether something is top-down or bottom-up.

 From an engineering point of view, it's a question of: let's write the 
standard, see if people can implement it, then see if it works, and then 
we'll fix it; vs., let's let things evolve, and then codify things once 
they're working.
>>
>> 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.

Anybody have any good anecdotes about RSS and Atom?  That seems like a 
particularly good example of a recent standard that started at the grass 
roots, went through lots of politics, and ended up as an IETF standard 
that's only partially adopted.

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