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Accelerating Standards
January 30, 2006
They say those who respect the law and eat sausages should watch neither being made. I tend to say the same about standards. Typically a slow, booooring process.
The Parlay Group kicked off an interesting initiative last October at its Boston meeting. Known as the API Accelerator, it mixed together use of the Wiki, Web Services and a "hothouse" style environment, to enable Parlay group members to create new candidate Parlay-X API standards. Among the first set of APIs addressed in Boston were Content Management, Message Broadcast, Calendar & Address Book, Subscriber Profile and Geocoding / Mapping. I took part in the event, and was very impressed (I was on the Geocoding/Mapping API team). We basically sat in a room for three days, organised as teams around each API, and - continually incented and prodded by the organisers - broke the back of defining some new Parlay-X based APIs for each of the core areas. We used a shared Wiki to record the emergence of the "speclets", were forced to present and receive feedback on each "speclet" every few hours as the work evolved. The event was such a success that the Group just repeated the exercise in mid-January, and added a slew of new APIs in to the mix, including Extended Call Control, Mailbox Management, and WAP Push Messaging, among others.
It's encouraging to see standards activity take on this kind of rapid, agile approach, as opposed to typical clock cycles associated with the area. I think this is exactly the kind of energy and approach that is more in tune with what the wider development community wants. If offers the potential for relevant, usable APIs to be delivered in a timely fashion. Most welcome.
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