Criteria for measurement of usefulness of standards
Version 2007-06-28, Makx Dekkers ( makx@makxdekkers.com )
Contents
1. Introduction
In the discussion document Draft criteria for usefulness of standards, a list of criteria from a standards perspective was listed as follows:
- Wide adoption, across domains (e.g. public and private usage) and across national borders: this would help both interoperability and economies of scale
- Expected stability and professional maintenance: this would manage the longer-term risk of having to change systems if standards change
- Openness of process and possibility to influence development: this would enable influence of the eGovernment sector to get specific requirements included in the standards
Rather than using these criteria to rank standards that we find in the harvesting exercise as "good" or "bad", or even worse, have a global ranking list, we should try to make a case that standards that do well on those criteria should be interesting candidates for eGovernment programmes to look at. I do think, however, that if we find a standard for a particular service unit that is being used by many eGovernment programmes across Europe, we should be able to recommend that standard.
That having been said, in the following I try to further refine the three areas and identify indicators and scores that we may want to assign to standards that we find.
2. Refinement of criteria
2.1. Area 1: Adoption
Visibility
- is mentioned on Wikipedia (yes/no)
- number of hits of reverse lookup of official standards document on Google
2.2. Area 2: Stability
Maintenance
- Stable maintenance process (yes/no)
2.3. Area 3: Openness
Development
- Free (no payment) particpation (yes/no)
- Geographically determined representation (yes/no)
- Closed group (yes/no)
3. Examples