Open Source and Open Standards
Brian Kelly has put his presentation (including performance) under a creative commons license. You can read about it all here.
Makes me realise we need to put a CC license on this blog.
Lecture notes below the fold
Open standards are generally seen to be a good thing - usual reasons. However adopting open standards does not guarantee all the benefits that are usually listed. You need to work at getting the benefits.
* Potential problem with standards that are too complex, over engineered etc.
* Users might not watn to change
* Migration might be expensive
As an example both Skype and Powerpoint are defacto standards but are closed formats. So...
What makes a standard open => Owned by a neutral body, published openly (freely?), open development, platform and application neutral.
RSS is a complex example. Several interpretations of the acronymn, never mind the actual specs. RSS 1.0 and 2.0 aren't really related. Dave Winer wrote 2.0 as an alternative to 1.0 . Has now degenerated into a governance war at some levels. RSS 3.0 was released as a joke so people will have to go to 4.0... this is a mess for trying to do any long term work with these standards.
"This is an open source conference so we don't do users" :-)
Strong parallels with OSS, the things that make standards work are much the same. Who's backing it, how long are they in for, how good is the documentation etc. This is at least as much about the context the stuff is being produced in as the actual properties of the stuff itself.
Open standards brings the question of 'what happens if you don't comply' what does it mean to say you 'must comply with the standard'. It also matters where you're applying a standard, to the extent where it interferes with people's ability to comply or understand the standards.
Proposes a three layer model for modelling standards. (see online slides). This looks at things from the point of view of the standard and the projects using them.
How do you handle QA? External check-ups dropped as not culturally in line with the HE community. Instead recommend self-assessment as the way forward. This needed to be simple and lightweight enough to use easily.
Remember that open standards exist to support users, not for their own sake. Proposes some core principles that lead to a more pragmatic adoptions of standards / software.
Watch out for fundamentalists - remember that user advocates can be fundamentalists, as can perfectionsists and these aren't necessarily any better than say vendor or open source fundamentalists. Good list of 'fundamentalists'
How do we extend all this to Open Source?
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Interesting bit on 'accessibility' standards. Basic point is that you don't want to talk about accessibility to document x or y, but to the end result - In the context of eductional software this would be access to the learning outcomes.
Suggests a metaphor of a 'tangram' guidelines that can be combined in a wide variety of ways to produce results that are appropriate to their context.
Questions
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Are standards prescriptive or descriptive? Is it just a 'folksonomy of the world'?
A bit. It's very difficult for a small group to mandate stuff that is out of step with the real world. However sometimes decisions need to be made and there there needs to be an awareness of what's going on, what's likely to work and so on.