IEEE Standards Staff

		Walter Pienciak
		Manager of Electronic Information
			voice:	+1 303 527 0934
			e-mail:	w.pienciak@ieee.org

(The photo above is from the FaceSaver machine at the USENIX LISA'96 conference in Chicago.)

I'm not exactly a prolific paper writer, but here's the text of a talk I gave in November 1995 at an ISO/IEC/ITU workshop in Seattle, called IEEE Experience in the Use of IT Tools for the Development of Standards. Hmmm. Maybe it's time to write something else (in my copious free time, of course).

Here's a short bio about my work here, written in September 2001.

Outside of work, I'm active outdoors with my family, and currently volunteer with USA Climbing and Tabitha International.

What does the Electronic Services group do?

We used to be called Research and Development. That wasn't the clearest label for the range of services we provide, but it does give some sense that we're not really an admin group.

We provide ISP-type services to several hundred Standards working groups:

• public and private webspace for working-group use
  • search capability for public and private areas
  • virtual hosting or co-location
• public and private FTP areas
• e-mail-based discussion groups
  • web-based archiving/searching
• chat software, wikis, whatever seems useful
• general CGI tools, weblog analysis, etc.

We also develop/maintain more specialized tools to aid the working groups:

• electronic balloting services
• specialized databases and web GUIs
• "collaborative environments" (secret projects)

And we develop and administrate the technical production flow for the Electronic Publishing staff:

• Develop/maintain SGML/XML DTDs and Frame+SGML EDDs.
• Write conversion routines from XML to HTML.
• Database record population from XML files.
• General juggling/tweaking of meta-information.
• Do you use XML? And Perl? Try XML::Twig, available at CPAN sites.

And we wrote and maintain the customer/access database management system for the on-line sales and delivery of IEEE Standards products, which includes on-line subscription and one-time-download models, with IP- and password-based access.

And we develop and support applications for the IEEE Registration Authority.

We maintain the hardware and software that all this stuff runs on. We also administrate search services for the IEEE; our public index includes 200+ IEEE sites around the world in over 100 domains. We can also provide site-specific search service on request (if you admin an IEEE site, that is).

And we generate all kinds of reports and data from a whole lot of sources to help the Standards Process Support staff.

And we go to meetings as technical liaisons, and make pronouncements of Good and Bad Things to Do; and we design architectures on whiteboards and napkins and in midair with our hands -- and then we have to implement them, so we try to draw carefully.

And we get to wear security hats, and analyze network traffic, and tweak host configurations, and evaluate programs that working groups want to run on our external systems.

And in our copious free time, we run new cables and change the hard drives and upgrade Word and get crumbs out of keyboards and "fix the Internet" and fill out purchase forms and add more toner and drink more coffee and buy more books.

It's a pretty fun group of people, really.

Most of the programming we do is in Perl; next I suppose would be Python and Ruby; we do less in Java and C these days.

We care a lot about standards (surprise!), and use phrases like " vendor neutrality," "browser independence," "accessibility initiatives" -- we think paying attention to details like that make our site (and the web) a better resource for everyone.

Our work environment leans strongly toward Unix, not because of any prejudice or unfamiliarity with other environments, but because it lets us do our jobs reliably and efficiently. Current flavors (in decreasing order) are Linux, Solaris, and OpenBSD.

Remember:
"We will serve no site before its time."

Bye!

This page is maintained by Walter Pienciak.