It’s official — the IEEE Standards Board approved our request that our working group be disbanded rather than continue. I’m both disappointed that it ended this way, and satisfied with the conclusion, because I believe that we did the best we could given the circumstances that emerged.

My hope had been that I could serve this effort by bringing a rigorous and evidence-based perspective from the academic research realm into the conversation. But it was not to be.

My take is that this project was unsuccessful because the framework under which IEEE standards are developed was ultimately not compatible with the way that participants wanted to proceed (in particular, with respect to open attributable deliberation and contribution, and ownership of intellectual property). I can’t speak for others of course, but my sense from our discussion is that a large majority of participants felt that if we couldn’t take a maximally open approach to process and materials, our work was unlikely to yield a credible standard for the communities we hoped to serve. The fact that many participants had been part of standards creation processes elsewhere that were open in the way we hoped added to a shared belief that such approaches were more than possible.

I learned 5 important lessons in this process.

1. There are more people on the same page than you might think. We had participants ranging from big tech and well-known open source foundations to small project community members, activists, and academics. We were able to move quickly and with consensus up until the point where we got intractably stuck.
2. Our technology is heavily intertwined with our ideas about organization structure. Coming from an IT background, I’ve always known that arguments about tech are rarely actually about tech — they’re almost always about human things: strategy, power, accountability, imagination, emotions. Early on, the openness struggle seemed to be in part about tooling — in particular the tech stack provided by IEEE versus what participants expected to use. Even once it was clear that this was a roadblock not a pothole, even though we knew it wasn’t really about the tech, the gaps between the tech stack and our aspirations were too wide to ignore. It was striking how much platform affordances shape and make invisible our beliefs and assumptions about access and process. E.g., if a password is required to see documents in a shared store, and the policy requires the shared store to be used exclusively, the policy de facto requires password access to view the document, even if the policy does not directly say so — and so on.
3. Our ideas about reasonable work processes are heavily influenced by the ideals of open source and free software. Although every now and then someone would remind us that this was “a standards process, not a software project,” the ideals and perspectives embodied in free software — particularly in commons-based peer production — drove our vision of what a standards process for a peer production context should look like. The lack of conformance to those goals and that ethos made the project unviable.
4. It’s possible to end things cleanly. I’ve never been part of a group that voted to dissolve itself, and it was a little bit refreshing to see this clarity emerge, and for people to stick with the project through to the actual end — at least in comparison to the alternative of bumping along, gradually declining in engagement, wasting folks’ time, and unable to progress. In the end, we had consensus to request to be disbanded, and the request was accepted.
5. Institutional convening power is significant but limited. I was drawn to the project because it was under the IEEE umbrella — and the IEEE is one of the academic societies where I’ve found a home. The prestige, neutral reputation, and strong track record of the institution brought us together in a way that I don’t think any of our affiliated organizations could have. But once we were gathered, it was clear that the institution that drew us together was not one where a project of this kind could be successful. When institutions make use of their power to convene diverse stakeholders around a novel goal, they should do so only having first conducted a concrete analysis to indicate whether the specific details of the structure they offer will support success.