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I posted on this topic back in early November and was delighted to get a couple of comments! So someone reads our blog, after all...!

Since the first post, I've been meaning to write a quick follow-up to respond to those comments but I wanted to wait until I'd had a chance to dig into it a bit more before I did so. Last week I spent some time at a software industry analyst event held by IBM in NY, and at one of the sessions managed to squeeze a question in to Karla Norsworthy (VP of Software Standards) and other assembled great-and-good of IBM working in the open source/open standards area.

What do you think of the situation, I asked - is there anything you think should be done to get enterprises (and governments) - users of IT - more involved in standardisation?

Karla came up with two good answers - thanks Karla! I'm pleased about this because IBM is obviously such a huge force in the industry and is heavily involved in just about any software standardisation effort you could think of. The answers? To paraphrase Karla:

1) "I think the real role for enterprises, more and more, is in helping create profiles for standards. We see the process of creating standards more and more as being about creating component standards that look at individual pieces of a problem, which are then composed into profiles. I think enterprises are unlikely to have the stomach for a lot of the real technical grunt work, but they might have a lot of value to add in helping create profiles"

2) "there are more and more standardisation efforts that are looking at industry-relevant things like vocabularies for message exchange and standard document types, and we definitely see more enterprise investment in these things, which have more immediate business impact and are more closely related to business issues."

Rod Smith (VP of Emerging Technologies) then at the last minute came up with a doozy that I'll admit I completely failed to think about - microformats. His take is that microformats are community-driven mashups of existing standards - and how right-on is that? ;-)

Seriously though, as I look into it I see that the emerging microformats "movement" does have a flavour of barbarians-storming-the-citadel about it. I'll be watching this movement with interest.

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