Open Meeting

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One of the 10 characteristics of Open Standards, as defined by Ken Krechmer.


Description

"All stakeholders can participate is a mantra of many formal SSOs. But this mantra does not address all the desires for Open Meetings. Some formal SSOs (e.g., ITU) and many consortia (e.g., W3C) have a pay-to-become-a-member policy. Paying to become a member is a significant economic barrier when a potential standardization participant is not sure they are even interested in attending a single meeting. Participation expenses, unless quite low, are part of real barriers to participation for students, many users and even start-up companies in the field. Currently only a few SSOs such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, the standardization organization for the Internet), and the IEEE offer low cost-per-meeting participation.

Currently openness of meetings is deemed to be met (e.g., under many SSO requirements) if all current stakeholders can participate in the standards creation process. But, as technology has become more complex, user participation in standards creation has declined. When the largest majority of stakeholders (users) no longer participate such a definition of open meetings is no longer functional.

Transparency is a useful concept to quantify both Open Meetings and Open Documents. There are two broad indicators of the level of transparency possible in Open Meetings:

1. All stakeholders can pay to become a member (current status of many SSOs).

2. Any person/organization can participate in the standardization process with acceptable cost to join on a per meeting basis." (http://www.csrstds.com/openstds.html)