How to Win Friends and Influence Standards Bodies

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# How to Make Friends and Influence Standards Bodies The greatest strength of the web is its openness. But not everyone appreciates how we arrived at the open web of today. A recent trend has cast standards bodies as bureaucracies that never accomplish anything of substance, while the heroic community innovates and implements “from scratch.” Reality is much less black-and-white: sandboxes like Node.js have received much from the web platform and language that spawned them, and have a lot to contribute back. Standards bodies are composed of implementers and community members willing to engage, not ivory tower philosophers handing down bad, never-tested APIs from on high. And real gains could be made for both sides—with some effort. This talk is part stories, and part lessons; it’s meant both to teach, and to open the floodgates for collaboration. You’ll hear about ways in which community input has had great impact on the standards process for the better, as in the case of web audio or adding promises to ES6. But you’ll also be taught communication and coalition-building skills that, from what I see, are sorely needed by many community members. How can you get involved and shape the future of the web and JavaScript platforms in a direction that will help everyone? Who are the key players and processes that they follow? Finally, together we’ll brainstorm on and identify some key areas where your expertise and hard-learned lessons could help the web platform toward future solutions for problems it’s encountered.

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