Global Challenges to Standard Setting: Integrating Newcomers

1
Global Challenges to Standard Setting
Integrating Newcomers

• D. Linda Garcia
• Prepared for conference Designing Cyber
  Infrastructure
• Washington, DC. Jan 29 30th 2007

Based on a paper by D. Linda Garcia and Kelsey
Burns presented to Chinas Technology Standards
Policy Workshop, Tsinghua University, Beijing,
China, January 1995.
2
The Challenge Opportunity

• Accessing global resources and business
  opportunities requires reaching out to new
  standards players with diverse interests.
• Integrating newcomers into the system will
  require negotiating processes and goals on
  everyones part.
• Effective negotiation can help traditional
  standards organizations innovate adapt to the
  changing global environment.

3
Communities of Practice A Useful Model

• As described by Wenger, communities of practice
  are distinct types of communities in which rules,
  norms, meaning and identity are established over
  time based on the ongoing interactions and
  negotiations that accompany participation in a
  shared enterprise.. Communities of practice
  exist because they sustain dense relations of
  mutual engagement organized around what they are
  there to do (Wenger, 1998).

4
Applied to standard setting. . .

• As described by Fomin,
• Through working on standards, actors, in an
  ongoing process of sensemaking, create new
  meanings of the technology under development....
  Aside from being tied to structures and its
  dependence on joint sensemaking, the
  standardization process can also be conceived as
  a negotiation process. Only through a process of
  negotiation and compromise is it possible to
  create a standard that can be diffused
  successfully. The negotiated need for a common
  standard makes it possible to bridge different
  visions and perceptions and, thus, acts as a
  mediator between the needs of involved parties
  (2002 92-93).

5
Changes in the Community

• Internally inducedthrough internal contests
  employing participation and reification.
• Externally inducedshared artifacts, overlapping
  memberships, peripheral actors.
• Newcomers to the community.

6
Change is a major endeavor.

• Overcoming resistance in a community requires a
  form of social translation. In particular, it
  requires that actors seeking to bring about
  change successfully create a narrative that not
  only problematizes a situation, but also provides
  a solution to it. In so doing, agents must not
  only generate interest and engage others but also
  mobilize supporters and allies on behalf of their
  proposed goals.

7
Three Case Studies

• The incorporation of regional European standards
  Organizations into the global standards arena.
• Cross boundary collaboration and the emergence of
  Consortia.
• China as a newcomerthe case of WAPI

8
Lessons to be learned

• Changes in European standards institutions were
  negotiated as well as contextualized within a
  narrative about European Union.
• Consortia and traditional SDOs had overlapping
  memberships, artifacts, etc.
• China and WAPI characterized by little
  negotiation, shared practice, and effective
  translation.

9
Conclusion

• Newcomers such as China need not be a threat. To
  the contrary, the participation in the standards
  setting processif negotiated and executed with a
  generous degree of give and takecan help the
  system to grow and innovate so as to keep pace
  with the rapidly changing global environment.