The INTERNORM Project

This paper presents a pilot project to reinforce participatory practices in standardization. The INTERNORM project creates an interactive knowledge center based on the sharing of academic skills and experiences accumulated by the civil society, especially consumer associations, environmental associations and trade unions to strengthen the participatory process of standardization. The first objective of the project is action-oriented: INTERNORM provides a common knowledge pool supporting the participation of civil society actors to international standard-setting activities by bringing them together with academic experts in working groups and providing logistic and financial support to their participation in meetings of national and international technical committees. The second objective is analytical: the standardization action provides a research field for a better understanding of the participatory dynamics underpinning international standardization. This paper presents three incentives that explain civil society (non-)involvement in standardization that overcome conventional resource-based hypotheses: an operational incentive related to the use of standards in the selective goods provided by associations to their membership; a thematic incentive provided by the setting of priorities by strategic committees created in some standardization organization; and a rhetorical incentive related to the discursive resource that civil society concerns offers to the different stakeholders.

Innovative or Indefensible? An Empirical Assessment of Patenting within Standard Setting

Cooperative standard setting may be burdened by “over patenting”. Because standards may convey market power to firms whose patents are implicated, “strategic” patenting may enable opportunistic behaviors. Thus, particular concerns have been raised over patenting that takes place after the first versions of a standard are published, as these patents may be aimed at the acquisition of market power. This is a reasonable concern, but another possibility also may be likely: “ex post” patenting may be driven by genuine innovation. Which is more prevalent? To begin answering this question, the author empirically assesses the patenting that occurs within a standard setting organization. The author rejects the first stage hypothesis that all ex post patenting must be opportunistic and conclude instead that such patenting is likely a mixed bag of (incremental) innovative contributions along with some strategic ones. As a result, standard setting policy prescriptions should proceed with caution so that the good is not eliminated with the bad.

Community-Driven Specifications

This paper explores the issues and opportunities for specifications that develop outside of the traditional governance processes of industry consortia or formal standards organisations through a discussion and comparison of three specifications developed in the education sector: XCRI (eXchanging Course-Related Information), SWORD (Simple Web service Offering Repository Deposit), and LEAP2.0 (Learner Portfolios 2.0). In each case study, there are challenges, opportunities, and accomplishments, and the experiences of each project are compared to identify commonalities and differences. Based on these case studies, the paper applies the framework developed by Wilson and Velayutham (2009) to position the specifications against similar specifications from established consortia and formal standards. Finally, the topic of incubating specifications is discussed, with implications for funding agencies with an interest in supporting interoperability.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Relationship between Organizational and Institutional Factors Shaping the Assimilation of Vertical Standards

Vertical standards describe products and services, define data formats and structures, and formalize and encode business processes for specific industries. Vertical standards enable end-to-end computing, provide greater visibility of the organization’s supply chain, and enable transactional efficiencies by automating routine tasks, reducing errors, and formally defining all parameters used to describe a product, service, or transaction. Research on standards diffusion has explored either firm-level and institutional variables, without integration of the two areas. This study develops scales for 11 constructs based on concepts culled from diffusion of innovations theory, organizational learning theories of technology adoption, institutional theory and network effects theory. The scales are validated with data collected from the membership of OASIS, a leading international standards-developing organization for electronic commerce technologies. Using data cluster analysis, relationship patterns between the 11 constructs are investigated. Results show that low fit between vertical standards and existing organizational business processes and data formats, low levels of anticipated benefits, and inadequate momentum with critical business partners contribute to slower vertical standards assimilation. However, organizational involvement with influential standards-development organizations, and the right set of technologies, skills, and structures to readily benefit from vertical standards spur their assimilation.

A Data Model for Describing and Exchanging Personal Achieved Learning Outcomes (PALO)

Employers seek people that match particular qualifications and graduates seek jobs that match their qualifications. This market is currently managed primarily using paper certificates and heterogeneous university management systems that capture achieved learning outcomes as well as corporate information systems that capture required qualifications. In light of trends toward increased student mobility, employability and lifelong learning, this situation is less than satisfactory. Therefore, in this paper, the authors propose a schema that facilitates interoperable storage and management of Personal Achieved Learning Outcomes (PALO) based on a common data model. This paper presents use case scenarios and implementations addressing these challenges and demonstrating the added value of using such a common model.

Key Challenges in the Design of Learning Technology Standards

This paper considers key challenges that learning technology standards must take into account: the inherent connectedness of the information and complexity as a cause of emergent behavior. Some of the limitations of historical approaches to information systems and standards development are briefly considered with generic strategies to tackle complexity and system adaptivity. A consideration of the facets of interoperability—organizational, syntactic and semantic—leads to an outline of a strategy for dealing with environmental complexity in the learning technology standards domain.

Beyond the “Point of No Return”

This paper analyzes the role of ‘irreversibility’ in the decision-making process for a standard for the national Dutch emergency communication network. In the late 1980s, ETSI, the European Telecommunication Standards Institute, started the development of the so-called Tetra standard. Tetra is a standard for digital radio communication and is mostly applied in emergency communication (for police, ambulance, and fire brigade). In the early 1990s, several European governments decided to replace their analogue radio equipment for emergency communication by advanced digital communication systems. The Dutch involvement in Tetra started around 1992, but it took until November 2001 before the official governmental decision to launch the national C2000 network was taken. This paper argues that at that moment the ‘point of no return’ of the C2000 project had already passed (in the mid 1990s). We explain this using the concept of ‘constructed irreversibility’. We analyze a number of core decisions and choices of the Dutch government in the C2000 project that resulted in irreversibility. We conclude by discussing the disadvantages and the advantages of irreversibility in this innovation project.

Interpreting and Enforcing the Voluntary FRAND Commitment

Although often debated as though it were public law, a FRAND undertaking is a private contract between a patent-holder and an SSO. Applying ordinary principles of contract interpretation to the case of ETSI IPR policy reveals that “interpretations” of FRAND advocated by some authors—including cumulative royalty limits, royalties set by counting patents, or a prohibition on capture by the patent-holder of any gains created by standardization—cannot be correct (ETSI, n.d.). Rather, a FRAND obligation leaves wide latitude to private parties negotiating a license. However, this does not mean that a FRAND commitment has no substance to be enforced by courts. In this paper, the authors review how, consistent with both contract principles and established judicial method, courts can enforce a contractual obligation to offer licenses on FRAND terms, without becoming IPR price regulators. Similarly, ordinary principles of contract interpretation reveal that the “non-discriminatory” portion of FRAND cannot be interpreted to be coextensive with common “most favored nations” provisions, but instead contemplates substantial latitude for private parties to negotiate terms suited to their particular situations.

Implementing Standardization Education at the National Level

This paper explores how standardization education can be implemented at the national level. Previous studies form the main source for the paper. This research shows that implementation of standardization in the national education system requires policy at the national level, a long term investment in support, and cooperation between industry, standardization bodies, academia, other institutions involved in education, and government. The approach should combine bottom-up and top-down. The paper is new in combining previous findings to an underpinned recommendation on how to implement standardization education.

Concepts and Standardization in Areas Relating to Competence

This paper reviews terminology, motivation, history and current work in areas relating to skill or competence. Many useful services, clarifying pathways within and from education to employment, self-assessment, and selection would be facilitated by better standardization of the format in which related definitions are represented, and also by a standard approach to representing the structured sets often called frameworks. To be effective, information models underlying interoperability specifications must be based on common conceptual models; the authors propose one such model as a work in progress. The authors see the way forward as reaching greater consensus about the components of competence, including intended learning outcomes, agreement on a model for frameworks allowing reuse of and comparison between components in and between frameworks, and investigation of how requirements and claims for skill and competence can be coordinated in the light of common practice in recruitment.