Corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year participating in standard setting activities, and sometimes bet their companies on the success or failure of a single standard. Given the stakes, why isn't the "standards professional" a recognized career track?

Standard setting organizations, like their members, vary widely in their effectiveness in setting standards and their success in getting them adopted.  Defining the goals to be pursued in a given standards area and finding the right SSO in which to achieve them merits care.  This article provides a framework in which to define those goals, and guidelines to ...

When Oracle announced that it would compete with Red Hat for the support business of Red Hat's own customers, it also sent a message intended to comfort the Linux community, announcing that it would join the premier Linux standard setting organizations.

Archaeologists try to extrapolate the past by inferring a lost world from the scraps its inhabitants left behind.  In the future, Wikipediologists will be able to learn more about today than perhaps we know about ourselves.  Assuming that someone volunteers to archive it on a regular basis…like, maybe, Google?