On August 29th, IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) jointly signed an agreement to affirm and adhere to a set of Principles in support of The Modern Paradigm for Standards; an open and collectively empowering model that will help radically improve the way people around the world develop new technologies and innovate for humanity.
The OpenStand principles—based on the effective and efficient standardization processes that have made the Internet and Web the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce—are proven in their ability to foster competition and cooperation, support innovation and interoperability and drive market success.
The OpenStand principles strive to encapsulate that successful standardization model and make it extendable across the contemporary, global economy’s gamut of technology spaces and markets. The principles comprise a modern paradigm in which the economics of global markets—fueled by technological innovation—drive global deployment of standards, regardless of their formal status within traditional bodies of national representation.
The OpenStand principles demand:
- cooperation among standards organizations;
- adherence to due process, broad consensus, transparency, balance and openness in standards development;
- commitment to technical merit, interoperability, competition, innovation and benefit to humanity;
- availability of standards to all, and
- voluntary adoption.
Standards developed and adopted via the OpenStand principles include IEEE standards for the Internet’s physical connectivity, IETF standards for end-to-end global Internet interoperability and the W3C standards for the World Wide Web.
Globally adopted design-automation standards, which have paved the way for a giant leap forward in industry’s ability to define complex electronic solutions, provide another example of standards developed in the spirit of the OpenStand principles. Another technology space that figures to demand such standards over the next decades is the global smart-grid effort, which seeks to augment regional facilities for electricity generation, distribution, delivery and consumption with a two-way, end-to-end network for communications and control.
IEEE, IAB, IETF, Internet Society and W3C invite other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles, which are available on the OpenStand Web site.
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