Developers Are the New Superpower: Matter.
Chances are pretty good that you don’t write standards, a vanishingly small number of people do. For many of us, it might almost seem that they’re handed down to us from the gods of Mt. Standard. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we’re thankful to them for our simple gifts. More often, it seems, we spend an inordinate amount of time praying for the wisdom to understand them. Frequently we question them, and occasionally we even curse them.
The Historical Power Structure
As a concept, standards themselves are a relatively modern human invention that came along with industrialization and trying to operate at scales we’d not previously imagined. For the first 50 years or so standards dealt with physical resources: Trains, electrical devices, metallurgy, automobiles, construction, etc. In this world, standards were effectively an exercise in getting very wealthy and powerful players to agree on what they’d provide to the masses. For a long time, businesses even fought standardization, but it turns out that really the only way to operate at very large scales is through increased common understanding and agreement. The more standard something is, the cheaper and more reliable it gets. In this era, the wealthy makers of iron, steel and silicon were the indeed the superpowers. If there ever was a thing like “Mt Standards” it was then.
Stolen Fire
But — if you do anything involved with the creation of something for the Web — whether that is design, writing HTML, designing service APIs, making games, a CMS or anything else there’s something you should know:
We matter more in this equation than many of us realize.
Software, especially open-source software, changed the game radically. Bits, unlike raw materials and heavy manufacturing, are cheap. All you need in order to innovate something interesting is a decent computer.
The Web and indeed, the Internet itself are living reminders of the fact that we matter.
While many people might not realize it, HTML was an upstart that competed with long-standing ISO standards like SGML. The TCP/IP we call the Internet today was an upstart that went up against the OSI “Seven Layer Model” which had been brewing in ISO for almost a decade. What happened? In a word: We chose them and rejected others.
While a standards body approved solution is appealing, it wasn’t all that mattered at the end of the day. So what did?
The reasons we chose them are complex and multi-layered to be sure. Volumes could be (and have been) written about it. It’s not simple. Both HTML and TCP/IP were simple compared with their counterparts. Discussion was also more open early on and they followed the IETF model of “rough consensus and running code” not process, that meant more early adopters. In the case of HTML, it inspired the right people at the right times to make browsers, and to make content, and at some point this became a feedback loop that led to exponential growth.
Whatever the reasons many reasons, however, the fact is simple: We developers chose to make one of them a success and not the others by selecting them. We learned them. We tried them. We advocated that they were worthwhile to business, which, in turn, built systems with more demand for those skills.
The Value of Standards
But — as importantly, when things started to look inevitable, then we standardized them. Why? Because useful and widely adopted is just that, it’s still not standard. There are benefits at all levels to eventual collaboration at massive scale with powerful players, from performance to stability to interoperability guarantees and legal protections. Groups like the W3C address a lot of this.
In short — there’s real value to crossing the standards finish line and that’s the one thing that standards bodies are historically really good at: Crossing the finish line. Crossing that line provides another major boost.
Innovation from within a standards process has a much poorer track record — and this creates a hard situation.
Developers: The new superpower.
So, a few decades in, we’re still trying to figure out how to do it really well. You matter, but the way in which you matter is historically messed up. The economics of developer participation has historically been broken. In practice, we’re frequently left to the tail-end of a very slow process. A wrong turn by a standards body can cost many years while walled-garden competitors run forward. So how do we do better?
Well, there’s not a simple silver bullet that will solve all our problems with a single shot but a lot of us have been hard at work on reforming things so that you can matter more effectively. Ideas like Chapters provide an outlet for groups to discuss provide feedback into developing standards in deep ways. The W3C Incubator Community Group provides a kind of ‘pre-standards’ process which lets things enter the pipeline, be discussed more openly and less overwhelming ways and helps good ideas from anywhere find traction, supporters and champions to navigate the subsequent process. Working groups themselves are making more efforts to be connected and open, and as a policy, we’re fighting to make this the norm.
One Simple Trick to matter more
It seems then that the core of the challenge is to find better ways to connect developers just like you to a better standards process: To tighten the feedback loop between standards and developers, avoid wasted time, allow ideas with the hope of adoption to rise and those without to fall more efficiently. Here’s one thing you can do with a seriously low barrier to entry: Can you tweet or share an opinion? If so, you’re capable.
The W3C has an elected body called the Technical Architecture Group, or TAG. It’s a kind of steering committee for the long term vision of the Web and it is chaired by the Director of W3C/creator of the Web Tim Berners-Lee. In 2013, with support of developers like you, we convinced electors to vote in a new breed of folk who understand this and can help steer the W3C back on track. In 3 years, we’ve managed to keep this up and I think we’ve seen a number of positive developments — those I mentioned above, unprecedented cooperation with other groups like IETF and ECMA, co-authorship of and efforts to help drive the ideas of The Extensible Web Manifesto.
Perhaps most importantly in my mind, however: In this time, members of the TAG have made substantial efforts to bring developers into the discussion and stay connected to reality. They’ve helped organize a number of free events that allow developers of all sorts to town-hall-like discussions. It’s much easier to rally support or correct course if we’re actually part of the discussion.
If this seems positive to you
There’s an election for TAG underway right now — it closes on January 8th, 2016 at midnight EST. It seems to me that one candidate has an exceptional strength that the TAG could really use. If you think that it’s important for the W3C to engage developers then Andrew Betts seems like a really solid asset. First off, he works most directly with developers. He isn’t from a browser vendor but he works regularly to bring them together with developers just like you. He organizes some of the best events in the industry like EdgeConf which doesn’t have speakers and lone talks but panels made up of all sorts of interests that get together and discuss with the wider audience and unconference activities for deeper discussion. By and large, he’s from “outside the process” in the same way that most of us are but widely respected by those on both ends of the equation. Andrew could be a great add.
However, the fact that people are generally happy with TAG and this being a small election with a number of good candidates means that there is a certain amount of apathy. In this situation, few will even vote and those who do are more likely to just vote based on simple name recognition of someone they respect. We’re lucky that in this case that’s still likely someone good: David Barron and Sangwhan Moon are excellent candidates with this advantage.
But if, like me, you think that Andrew’s qualities are something we want: We need to prod the system.
Either way — we should prod the system. All it takes is a simple tweet of support, a short encouraging email to a W3C member if you know one, a share on social media. Whether you agree or disagree, I’d like to encourage real developers to speak up. I’ve made my case, feel free to make another. It matters. Believe it or not, you probably have some connection to at least one of the roughly 400 W3C member organization who can cast a vote. It’s worked before, organizations will listen to developers if we speak up.
So this is it…
Developers are the new super powers — we hold up the standards world: The future is ours to shape. The only thing I can say for sure is that you’ll never convince anyone if you don’t try.
I’d like to see Andrew get one of those seats and the other to go to David or Sangwhan. What do you think?
If you want to be part of the conversation — speak up.
