standards development process

[Henry Spencer]

> Future language standardizations should have more representation by
> users, and this should be required by ANSI...

How do you propose that they should require this?  Forbid standardization
without adequate user representation?  In practice this would lead to
very few standards being written.  There is NO LAW against more users
getting involved in ANSI standardization work!!  The problem is that
few of them bother.  Without users who actively care and get involved,
the situation is not going to get better; with them, the problem will cure
itself without changes to the rules.  ANSI standards committees are quite
explicitly open to anyone who wants to join.  If you care so much, why
weren't you in X3J11?  (I don't see your name in the membership list that
came with the second-public-comment draft.)

Remember that participation in something like X3J11 takes non-trivial
amounts of time and money, particularly time.  How many users are going
to get assigned to such things as part of their job?  Without that, it
really is quite difficult to find the time.  I am *not* an X3J11 member
partly because I can't find the time to do a proper job of it; it's not
easy to find the time for the peripheral involvement that I do have.
-- 
"Noalias must go.  This is           |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
non-negotiable."  --DMR              | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry