1. Global Challenges to Standard Setting: Integrating Newcomers D. Linda Garcia Prepared for conference “Designing Cyber Infrastructure” Washington, DC. Jan 29 & 30 th 2007 Based on a paper by D. Linda Garcia and Kelsey Burns presented to China’s Technology Standards Policy Workshop, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, January 1995.

2. The Challenge & Opportunity Accessing global resources and business opportunities requires reaching out to new standards players with diverse interests. Integrating newcomers into the system will require negotiating processes and goals on everyone’s part. Effective negotiation can help traditional standards organizations innovate & adapt to the changing global environment.

3. Communities of Practice: A Useful Model As described by Wenger, “communities of practice are distinct types of communities in which rules, norms, meaning and identity are established over time based on the ongoing interactions and negotiations that accompany participation in a shared enterprise.. … [Communities of practice exist] because they sustain dense relations of mutual engagement organized around what they are there to do (Wenger, 1998).

4. Applied to standard setting... As described by Fomin, “Through working on standards, actors, in an ongoing process of sensemaking, create new meanings of the technology under development.... Aside from being tied to structures and its dependence on joint sensemaking, the standardization process can also be conceived as a negotiation process. Only through a process of negotiation and compromise is it possible to create a standard that can be diffused successfully. The negotiated need for a common standard makes it possible to bridge different visions and perceptions and, thus, acts as a mediator between the needs of involved parties” (2002: 92-93).

5. Changes in the Community Internally induced—through internal contests employing participation and reification. Externally induced—shared artifacts, overlapping memberships, peripheral actors. Newcomers to the community.

6. Change is a major endeavor. Overcoming resistance in a community requires a form of social translation. In particular, it requires that actors seeking to bring about change successfully create a narrative that not only problematizes a situation, but also provides a solution to it. In so doing, agents must not only generate interest and engage others but also mobilize supporters and allies on behalf of their proposed goals.

7. Three Case Studies The incorporation of regional European standards Organizations into the global standards arena. Cross boundary collaboration and the emergence of Consortia. China as a newcomer—the case of WAPI

8. Lessons to be learned Changes in European standards institutions were negotiated as well as contextualized within a narrative about European Union. Consortia and traditional SDOs had overlapping memberships, artifacts, etc. China and WAPI characterized by little negotiation, shared practice, and effective translation.

9. Conclusion Newcomers such as China need not be a threat. To the contrary, the participation in the standards setting process—if negotiated and executed with a generous degree of give and take—can help the system to grow and innovate so as to keep pace with the rapidly changing global environment.