Designed by Committee.
Watchmen is awesome. Let me get this out of the way, first of all.
And for those who didn’t enjoy it: I still think that you might be decent human beings, but by God, what’s wrong with you?
But now that’s out of they way, what I want to write about today is about the ’standardisation process’. If you do not like the topic (like I don’t) or believe it irrelevant, you may stop reading now.
Plato, when asked the question of ‘Who will watch the watchmen’, he said that they themselves will, because they will believe that they are better than the other people. Through this egotism and alpha-male altruism, Plato believed, that the society could have a safeguard against failure.
What an idiot.
Government-sanctioned technical committee are a bit like that. They are entrusted (and that’s where the word comes from) by the people to produce something useful, and what they produce will have large legal, technical and financial implications.
If the enforcement is the person wielding a hammer, and the law is something that gives him the right to use it, the committee decides what the hammer is made of.
And the answer is not always as straightforward as you might imagine. What is the manufacturer of Egyptian cotton doing in this committee?
The year was 2005, and I found myself at the round table of a HISO committee. I was to write the draft standard for what would dictate how various health-IT organisations in New Zealand would exchange electronic data.
I was a software developer with four years under my belt - which is like fucking forever, right? - and for the first time in my life, had a ‘team’. (I was cocky enough to call myself a ’senior software developer’ or a ‘technical lead’)
I was bulletproof.
I made jokes about the committee and others around me laughed with me, but I believed firmly that I was in the committee because I was better, I knew better, and I could lead all of them to a better place.
And by God, how quickly the power corrupts. And by God, what an idiot I was.
The first thing I did was to grab the requirement specification document of the product that we were busy implementing, deleted all the trademarked words, and submitted it as the draft standards document.
It had holes in it, it had some strange decisions that were not fully justified (or justifiable), it was still in pre-alpha stage of development, and it was all around propriety, ignored all existing related W3C standards. But it works, ok? Isn’t that what’s required of the committee?
My ulterior motive was to get my document accepted; that would mean I wouldn’t need to implement a standard; my programme would be the standard. Everyone would want to buy a copy of my software; it will be the only one available; and you’ll be required by law to purchase a ’standardised’ software.
Looking back now, I see that pushing an ulterior motive through a committee is impossible. On the other hand, blocking other people’s motives is dead simple: stall.
There are four all-day meetings a year. And by ‘all-day’, we mean about 4 hours long. first hour will be spent on recapping, the middle two on lunch, and the last hour on organising the next meeting. There is very little stalling to do.
They stalled me, I stalled them. All along the watchtower, watchmen were busy stalling themselves.
I’ll save you the details. It’s not interesting. What I want to say is this:
Do not attend a committee with an ulterior motive, because you won’t get it through, and you’ll make everyone else’s life a little bit more pointless. It does not matter whether you think it’s clever (it’s not) and it’ll work (it won’t) and other people on the committee are idiots (so are you).
If you have an ulterior motive, go with a little bit more direct approach. And yes, I’m fully condoning the use of violence and blackmailing.