Comments on: Can Grassroots Action “Save” the Education Technology Standards World from Itself? http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/adam/2010/01/06/can-grassroots-action-save-the-education-technology-standards-world-from-itself/ Cetis Blogs Wed, 07 Jan 2015 09:19:39 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.22 By: adam http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/adam/2010/01/06/can-grassroots-action-save-the-education-technology-standards-world-from-itself/#comment-36 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:32:11 +0000 http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/adam/?p=159#comment-36 Thanks for the comment Jo. I fully go along with the “working with what works”; frankly I don’t care where a useful and properly licenced (no nasty patent or other IPR surprises) spec comes from. Actually, I’d like to see more commercial proprietary specs published under liberal licence terms for anyone to pick up, adopt, borrow models from etc.

]]> By: Jo Walsh http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/adam/2010/01/06/can-grassroots-action-save-the-education-technology-standards-world-from-itself/#comment-35 Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:01:01 +0000 http://blogs.cetis.org.uk/adam/?p=159#comment-35 Thanks for the essay.

In the world of geospatial standards, the Open Geospatial Consortium has a decent track record for picking up “community” standards – GeoRSS, which emerged from the same kind of informal discussions as RSS – and KML, which had commercial origins but was being widely used for innovative, grass-rootsy web mapping work.

There’s a big contrast between the ISO mindset of standards for the INSPIRE directive on sharing geographic data within Europe, and the Linked Data mindset which is informing data.gov.uk – and it is good to see the “working with what works” approach becoming more acceptable.

You might be interested in this Tim Bray article which touches on similar themes, about the technical benefits of community-driven emerging standards rather than a UML-first approach:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/01/02/Doing-It-Wrong

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