📄Standards overview

An overview of what standards are and the benefits of adopting them

"A standard is an agreed-upon way of doing things. It can be a product specification, a process for producing a good or service, or a process for undertaking any other form of economic activity, such as supplying goods or services." - Economic benefits of standards, BSI.

Standards are crucial in modern-day life, as many of them are integrated into the products and services we use daily. Various organisations aid in creating, maintaining, and adopting standards on a national or even international scale. One example organisation that assists with internationally adopted standards is the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

Benefits of using standards

Standards provide a myriad of benefits to the communities that adopt them.

Efficiency

Standards help create a common framework for processes and systems which enables more uniformity and consistency in the way tasks are performed and how products are produced. This makes it easier to offer educational resources on how to most effectively adopt those standards which saves time and costs for anyone that adopts them. Standards can also help with improving safety by helping to eliminate potential errors which can save time or resources which lead to further efficiency improvements. Projects who adopt standards also benefit from not needing to solve every problem themselves which saves them time by using standards that are already well defined and adopted. Seeing how other projects integrate and use these adopted standards provides another way in which the speed of education and adoption can increase for the projects which are considering adopting a standard. Standards can also often have reference implementations which offer another way to save developers significant time in trialling and integrating standards into their own projects. These factors combine in supporting how standards help to increase the overall efficiency of delivering products and services.

Simplicity

Standards help with providing a common and agreed-upon set of rules and guidelines that ensure interoperability, compatibility, and ease of use across various products and systems. This reduces complexity and confusion by providing a clear and consistent way of doing things, which can make it easier for people to understand, use, and integrate different technologies. As a simple example, a company producing microwave ovens can use electrical plugs that follow existing national adopted standards. Adopting this approach increases the simplicity for the end consumer who receives a product that they are more familiar with how it is used. For companies this simplicity is increased by them being able to simply adopt that standard such as a standard for an electrical plug and then focus more of their efforts on improving their actual product. Combining and using multiple standards within a project can help developers build even more complex applications as more of the foundational aspects of the project may already have solutions which they can use to build on top of to create their own application.

Consistency

Consistency created from adopting standards is beneficial because it reduces confusion, improves reliability, and makes it easier for people to transfer their knowledge and skills from one system to another. Standards improve consistency by helping to establish a common set of rules, specifications, and guidelines that ensure that products, systems, and processes are alike and work in a uniform manner. This leads to greater consistency in how things are done, making it easier for people to understand, use, and integrate different technologies. For software applications this could standardising data structures, storage or coding approaches to find a uniform approach. Consistency in products and services through the adoption of standards results in people being able to learn a small number of standards and apply those skills across any of the different areas or industries which use those standards. Additionally this consistency often leads to improved user experience as people are able to more easily predict how things will behave which reduces frustration and makes it easier to accomplish tasks. Developers who follow a commonly adopted approach are less likely to make mistakes in their own applications as they can rely on highly tested and adopted existing implementations of popular standards.

Interoperable

Providing a consistent set of rules, specifications and guidelines means that products, services and infrastructure can become more interoperable. This is beneficial for systems as they are then better able to share data and resources which helps further eliminate integration complexities. Easier integration between systems and services or having the flexibility to more easily move between them helps with improving the end user experience, the reliability and scalability of these integrated systems and also reduces the risk of incompatibility issues. Standards used across databases and blockchains would help with making it easier for developers to migrate between chains due to common approaches being used in a multiple places which helps applications more easily integrate the right infrastructure suited for each of the use cases. A good example of a standard that is effective for interoperability is Decentralized Identifier (DID) standard which uses a standardised approach to find and retrieve DID documents which has then been implemented on a number of different blockchain ledgers.

Increased competition

Commonly adopted standards help to reduce the cost in delivering certain products and services. The easier they are to deliver the lower the barrier of entry is to offer that product or service. Standards that help increase the ease of delivering products and services will help with increasing the competition between providers. This can then help with driving down prices and increasing innovation. More competition will help with continuously improving the overall user experience due to the heightened need to provide quality products and services in a competitive market. For software projects adopting standards can also allow for people to focus on other areas of their applications and make more specialised feature sets by not needing to worry about problems which are solved by already adopted standards. This increases the speed of development meaning the market can become more fast paced and quickly evolve to meet consumer demand.

Increased robustness

Standards help with defining best practices, processes and guidelines to follow to create reliable and secure systems and processes. Following standards and ensuring each task is correctly executed and tested helps with increasing the overall reliability and security of that system. The more that a standard is adopted the more real life scenarios it could be being used in. Changes can be made to standards that need further refinement and this refinement can help to further increase the robustness of the standard. For standards that are already well refined any increased usage and adoption only further helps demonstrate the robustness of the standard through the services or products which have adopted it and are operating successfully. Consumers can have increased confidence in products and services that utilise standards which are well adopted. Increased adoption of standards also helps with fostering collaboration around the standard on a continued basis. This feedback cycle from real world usage only further helps to refine and improve an existing standard to become a more robust and effective version. Adopting standards also help with increasing robustness for software applications by reducing the amount of code needed in the application to create a solution which reduces the surface area for mistakes that the developers could make if they had to solve that problem and implement a solution by themselves. Well analysed, tested and verified software for a particular standard helps to reduce the chance of errors and flaws being introduced into end user applications that adopt different software libraries that are built on standards.

Other factors to consider

1. Difficulty in creating a common solution approaches

One of the big reasons that many people are interested in joining the Web3 movement is the diversity of ideas and ways communities are trying to solve different problems. Some markets and problem areas will have a higher amount of diversity than others in the problems that exist and the number of ways those problems can be solved. The more the diversity there is in the potential approaches that can be taken the more difficult it could become to create common standards. There may not be an optimal way to solve a given problem and the trade offs also may not be immediately clear. Plenty of observation, analysis and experimentation will be needed to create standards which are flexible to these scenarios that can handle and respond to the different trade offs. Standards could be have their complexity reduced and instead focus on one particular approach to solving a problem at a time. Multiple standards could be made to cover different approaches to solving a problem rather than trying to condense them into a single approach. Understanding the variations on these standards being created will help with better identifying and sharing any commonalities between the standards and further help reduce duplication where possible.

2. Ongoing maintenance effort

For standards that get widely adopted it becomes increasingly important to consider the implications of how that standard is maintained and updated. Usually these changes can be achieved through new versions. However high adoption of a particular version can also create a higher cost for migrating to newer versions of a standard. If a standard becomes complex to maintain and update then the standard could even become the bottleneck for further innovation. Due to this consideration will be needed on how standards are versioned, reviewed and updated. Checks and balances will be needed to determine how a standard is updated to newer versions and based on what factors, evidence and community feedback. Backwards compatibility will be a constant concern for standards which get more adopted over time. Some standards will have data that could be stored on an immutable blockchain. Considerations will be needed towards how those services are able to be updated and improved over time based on new or changing standards.

3. Importance of open source software

Open source software is an important part of implementing and integrating digital standards into infrastructure and real world applications. Infrastructure and utility libraries can save developers countless hours if they are able to access reference implementations of a standards based solution. Adopting open source software helps with providing increasing levels of security as the software continuously goes through usage and review from other communities that integrate the software. The flexibility and transparency of this software can help to speed up the development of new standards. For instance, if a group of people were working on a standard to help handle and distribute community treasuries then this standard could benefit from integrating existing standards on escrow contracts, invoices or date and time standards like the ISO 8601 date and format standard. Developers can then utilise libraries that implement these standards in existing libraries and use them to increase the simplicity and quality of their own implementations of newer standard. The effective adoption and integration of open source software into emerging standards helps create increasingly robust and interoperable applications and services.

Examples of widely adopted standards

Hundreds of standards have been adopted globally that have provided significant benefit to how society functions and how we collectively can deliver better products and services.

TCP/IP network protocols

The Internet Protocol (IP) is an address system of the internet. The TCP protocol can be thought of as the puzzle assembler that puts the pieces together in the right order and asks for any missing pieces to be resent. It is due to the international adoption of both TCP and IP networking protocol standards that the internet functions as it does today. TCP & IP are widely known and globally adopted open standards. The most widely adopted internet services rely on these protocols for their own products to function and provide value to the end user. The amount of value these protocols have delivered to people globally through their adoption that anyone can use is unprecedented. It is protocols like these that showcase the potential impact of creating quality standards for important global problems.

ISO 8601 Date and time standard

The ISO 8601 standard is a widely adopted standard that helps with formatting and storing dates. This standard is often integrated into databases and software libraries for creating, maintaining and storing dates. Software developers benefit from these standards due to a reduction in complexity by not needing to allocate as much time towards handling dates in their own services due to being able to adopt an existing approach through an existing standard.

AC Power plug and socket standards

There are a number of different AC power plug and socket standards used across the world. Conforming to a relatively small number of standards helps make it simpler for electronic manufacturers to provide solutions for each country. Some of these standards can be considered more effective than others and it is this reason that spending time on standards is so important. Once certain standards are well adopted it becomes time consuming and potentially costly in resources to change to a new approach. Standardisation of power plugs and sockets has been massively beneficial to simplifying how electronic devices and appliances connect to the electrical grid and can be used safely by the end user.