Standards don’t foster innovation, they codify it

After all my ruminating on SCORM 2.0 the last couple of weeks, it was interesting to read about the latest news regarding the ECMAScript standard.

It was even more interesting to read some of the reactions, including those from Adobe’s Dave McAllister and Yahoo’s Douglas Crockford. I swear this passage from Crockford could have come directly from one of the SCORM 2.0 discussions:

The success of this project will depend on the ability of TC39 to do a better job of managing the tradeoffs between innovation and stability, and adopting a discipline for managing complexity. Simplicity should be highly valued in a standard. Simplicity cannot be added. Instead, complexity must be removed.

It turns out that standard bodies are not good places to innovate. That’s what laboratories and startups are for. Standards must be drafted by consensus. Standards must be free of controversy. If a feature is too murky to produce a consensus, then it should not be a candidate for standardization. It is for a good reason that “design by committee” is a pejorative. Standards bodies should not be in the business of design. They should stick to careful specification, which is important and difficult work.

Just substitute LETSI for “TC39″ and you have a very relevant, poignant piece of advice for the SCORM 2.0 workgroup as it moves forward.

A common thread in many of the posts I’ve been reading is that standards do not lead to innovation, but rather that innovation leads to standardization. Adobe’s Mike Chambers has a great compilation of comments on this topic. I especially found this quote on standards from Dojo’s Alex Russell to be very insightful:

we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality.

LETSI has promised to foster innovation. Will LETSI attempt to codify innovative and non-standardized technology or practices into a standard? Will it only accept existing standards (royalty-free standards, at that)?

The Raising of SCORM 2.0 will be interesting to watch as it plays out.

Related posts:

1. IMS issues press release for new e-learning interoperability standards
2. SCORM resources
3. SCORM 2.0: high-level solutions or low-level tools?
4. Does SCORM need a little brother?
5. Why don’t more e-learning developers use standards?