The following is the text of the Editorial from the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. You can find the complete issue here, and receive a free subscription here.
On January 20, a new show opened in Washington D.C. After eight years under one administration, the curtain cascaded down on one set of policies, and a moment later rose to unveil a new administration, with new ideas, new priorities, and a new agenda. Included in that agenda is a commitment to embark on a five year quest to dramatically decrease the cost of healthcare — by investing as much as $50 billion dollars of public funds in the design and deployment of something called "electronic health records," or EHRs.
Readers of this Blog, but not the public at large, will be immediately aware that the foundation for the EHR vision is standards.
The following piece is taken from the latest (October-November 2008) issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
The goals of the Obama administration are in tune with — but in some technical respects, ahead of — the technological times. As discussed in the Editorial to this issue, unless certain standards-related dependencies are promptly addressed, the timely achievement of the president-elect's innovation and technology policy will be jeopardized. But, as examined in the Feature Article of this issue, the government does not have the historical competency to address these dependencies. What, then, is the new administration to do?
The following is an integrated suite of recommendations that could be implemented quickly and inexpensively, and without Congressional action. Of the ten proposals, the first is most urgent, as the advisors assembled in this step would provide the experience, guidance and active assistance needed to implement the recommendations that follow.
The following piece is the editorial in the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today. The issue is titled, A Standards Agenda for the Obama Administration and includes further articles on that topic. For a free subscription to Standards Today, click here.
Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever. More than a year ago, he released a policy statement on technology and innovation that detailed his plans to employ state of the art technology to pursue a broad spectrum of goals, such as increasing national competitiveness, providing next-generation broadband access for all, creating a "transparent and connected democracy," decreasing health care costs, acting to prevent global warming, and lowering American dependence on foreign oil. In pursuit of these goals, he also promised to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer.
These are worthy and important goals. Like the other commendable promises the president-elect has made, they will be difficult to realize, for reasons both obvious and subtle. The obvious challenges include a crowded and ambitious agenda, the difficulties of achieving political consensus, and above all, the overarching urgency of addressing a global economic meltdown that demands attention above all else.
But there are subtle hurdles that are equally daunting, if less visible. They include the need to develop a multitude of new information and communications technology (ICT) standards in record time, utilizing a standards creation process that is at best loosely coordinated, frequently contentious, and almost completely independent of government influence or control. Moreover, the current standards development infrastructure was never designed to create the suites of closely integrated standards that will be needed to solve the types of complex problems embedded in the Obama technology and innovation agenda. But while the challenge of creating standards-based solutions may be uninteresting from a policy perspective, an inability to perform in this pursuit may present as serious an impediment to success as any failure to secure requisite funding or garner sufficient Congressional support.
Consider just the following examples from the Obama technology and innovation platform:
The latest blowback from the OOXML adoption process emerged last Friday in Brasilia, Brazil. This newest challenge to the continued relevance of ISO and IEC was thrown when major IT agencies of six nations - Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Paraguay, South Africa and Venezuela - signed a declaration that deploring the refusal of ISO and IEC to further review the appeals submitted by the National Bodies of four nations. Those nations were Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela, and the statement is titled the CONSEGI 2008 Declaration, after the conference at which it was delivered. The Declaration notes, "That these concerns were not properly addressed in the form of a conciliation panel reflects poorly on the integrity of these international standards development institutions," and concludes, "Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands."
The decision to make the statement flows in part from the fact that the National Bodies of each of the four countries that had filed appeals have decided that it would be fruitless to further press their formal protests. This has left government IT agencies with no choice but to reconsider what, if anything, the adoption of a standard by ISO/IEC JTC 1 should mean to them when they make standards-based decisions. The statement indicates that ISO and IEC have underestimated the possible consequences of not taking the appeals more seriously, and states in part:
At any one time I'm usually helping set up anywhere from two to five new standards consortia and open source foundations, and the gestational stealth period can be anywhere from two to eight months. That's because the time will vary depending on how much time it takes to work everything out among the founders and recruit the type of starter set of members that you'd like to have to give an impression of inevitability to whatever it is that the founders are trying to make happen in the wider world. As a result, it's always a pleasure to help introduce a new organization that has just emerged onto the public stage, and particularly so when the new consortium's mission is socially relevant.
That's the case with the Alliance for Sustainable Air Transportation, whose mission will ultimately effect just about everyone that reads this blog entry. In a nutshell, ASAT will help US airports, in cooperation with those around the world, make the move to a next generation air traffic control system that will increase safety, decrease congestion, and lower fuel consumption - three goals that certainly anyone would endorse. You can find ASAT's Web site here, and I've pasted the full text of a press release issued last week in at the end of this blog entry.
Here are further details on what this new organization is all about.
On Wednesday, I introduced The Hague Declaration to those that visit this blog, promising to write again shortly to introduce the new organization that created the Declaration. That organization is called the Digital Standards Organization (Digistan, for short), and I'm pleased to say that I am one of its founders. In this entry, I'll give you my perceptions of what Digistan is all about, and what I hope it will accomplish.
You'll notice that I just used the words "my perceptions." This is for a number of reasons, the first being that this is still a very young organization that has taken shape, primarily via a listserv. I was welcomed onto the founders listserv on November 12, bringing the total number of participants to 13. Since then, that list has grown. As of today, there are 19 individuals that have agreed to publicly associate themselves with the organization as founders, and it would be fair to say that there is a broad range of views (from conservative to radical) represented in this cross section of experienced professionals. Together, we have been reaching consensus on various pieces of the still-incomplete and evolving puzzle, adding them to the Digistan site as sufficient agreement is reached to make them public, while still allowing the pieces to change to reflect continuing discussion.
The result is that the organization, to an extent, is not unlike the story of the five blind men touching the proverbial elephant, but with a twist. It would be more accurate to say that each of the blind men has arrived on the scene not to find a strange new creature, but rather bearing a piece of the elephant. Today, we are still completing the process of putting the beast together. For this reason, what I write in this entry should be regarded as my perceptions alone, and the rights of the other founders to describe their piece of the elephant, and their vision of the final product, must be preserved.
With all that said, what is innovative new animal we call "Digistan?" Here's how it feels to me.
The basic premise is that as more and more of our basic freedoms (speech, assembly, interaction with government, and so on) move from the real to the virtual world, care must be taken to ensure that our ability to exercise …
Back in March of 2006, I interviewed Alan Cote, the Supervisor of Public Records in the Public Records Division of the Massachusetts Secretary's office. Alan had testified back in October of 2005 in the hearing where Peter Quinn had been called on the carpet by Senator Marc Pacheco, the Chair of the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight. At the Pacheco hearing, Alan had professed neutrality about ODF, but also doubts that document formats could provide a useful tool for document preservation.
What struck me most forcefully at both the hearing as well as the interview was that Alan presumably should have been one of the biggest proponents of open formats, rather than a doubting Thomas. Why? Because the process he now follows to preserve electronic documents seems almost comically cumbersome and tedious. Briefly summarized, it involves recopying every single electronic document every five years or so onto new media (electronic media degrade surprisingly rapidly) in multiple formats (because formats are regularly abandoned). Shouldn't someone stuck with such a chore be desperate to find a better way?
Apparently, preserving documents is child's play compared to preserving modern movies, especially those created initially in digital form. How bad - and expensive - is that? According to a 74 page study released by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAD) to a limited audience in early November, preserving a full-length digital movie can cost $208,569 (dramatic pause) per year. The reasons are exactly the same as for digitized documents, and the currently available means of preservation are the same as well. The amount of data involved, however, is vastly greater - and no commitment to remain faithful to a single standard (yet) exists to ensure that future technologies will be able to display movies created using today's techniques.
Some twenty years ago, information technology vendors began opting out of the accredited standards system with increasing frequency in order to form organizations they called fora, alliances, and (most often) consortia. The reasons for the schism were several, but the development was remarkable in that the separatists presumed that standards could become ubiquitous whether or not they acquired the imprimatur of one of the "Big Is:" the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). And they were right.
Today, there are hundreds of consortia, and many of these organizations have achieved a size, work output, membership, influence and respect that equal that of their accredited peers. Along the way, the information and (to a lesser extent) communications technology industries have come to rely heavily upon consortia to supply their standards needs. But even as this parallel universe of standard setting has achieved respectability, an interesting trend has developed: more and more standards that have been created by consortia are being submitted to one of the "Big Is" for adoption.
On any given day you can find thousands of words of reporting, advocacy and debate over the role of patents in technology. One side promotes the availability of patent protection as the source of much innovation, while the other contends that patents have exactly the opposite effect, and many other vices besides.
There is, however, one inequity that patents help to perpetuate that gets little attention. That inequity arises in the area of standards, where the owners of patents can exercise significant influence not only over the costs of implementing standards, but over who can reap the greatest economic benefits from producing standardized products at all. In a nutshell, this inequity works to the favor of patent owners in developed countries, and to the disadvantage of the industries of developing countries, making it that much harder for those living in emerging nations to attain the same standard of living as those lucky enough to be born into the developed world.
I dedicated the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today, to this topic, and if you're interested in the intersection of social justice, intellectual property and government, you might find it worth a read. Here's what the issue is all about.