SUO WG Status
All,
As chair of this IEEE working group, I should probably say
something.
First, current discussions are fine for now, since we don't have
any feedback on our documents to work on.
Here is my view on the status of this working group.
To develop a successful standard, certain ingredients are needed.
I would list these as:
a. Charter and organizational structure (We established
that about 5 years ago)
b. Members (We have quite a few), including technical
editors with the time to work on the documents.
c. Draft document(s) (We have about 6 documents at
various stages of maturity)
d. Actual use of the documents (This is what we need
next.) This surfaces proposed changes, leads to improvements in the
document, builds consensus in the working group, and can lead to market
adoption.
e. Consensus. In our case, it means both consensus on
which document to select, and consensus on the details of that document.
Market momentum may be needed for this.
f. Market adoption.
Regarding timing, IEEE uses artificial deadlines to spur working
groups along, and also to dissolve those not making progress. But in
reality, there is no deadline. The initial deadline is 4-years, which we
faced last fall, and easily obtained a 2-year extension. If we are
making good progress by the fall of 2006, we can get further extensions.
But if not, the charter could be allowed to expire, but this discussion
list would remain, and we could simply wait to see if any of the starter
documents gain utilization or market adoption. If progress resumes, we
request a new charter from IEEE.
The bottom line, in my opinion, is we now need actual utilization
(by a variety of users) of one or more of our starter documents (and
feedback from them) to make further progress.
All other opinions welcome.
Jim Schoening
Chair, SUO WG