Five global organisations —IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – have announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards.
The shared "OpenStand" principles — based on the effective and efficient standardisation processes that have made the Internet and Web the premiere platforms for innovation and borderless commerce — are seen to be proven in their ability to foster competition and cooperation, support innovation and interoperability and drive market success.
IEEE, IAB, IETF, Internet Society and W3C invite other standards organisations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles, which are available at the OpenStand website.
The OpenStand principles strive to encapsulate that successful standardisation 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 — fuelled 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 organisations, 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.
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.
