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Guest Talk with JoAnne Yates | The Trajectory of Global Standard Setting

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Guest Talk with JoAnne Yates | The Trajectory of Global Standard Setting
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JoAnne Yates, co-author of 'Engineering Rules,' traces three historical waves of private voluntary standard-setting from 1880 to today: the emergence of national bodies like BSI and IEC driven by figures like Charles le Maistre, the post-WWII rise of ISO as a global consensus-based leader, and the post-1980s fragmentation caused by competitors like IETF, corporate consortia, and W3C that challenge ISO's balanced-consensus model. She closes by questioning whether protocol-setting communities (e.g., Ethereum, coal mining safety) have developed the same cross-community coordination infrastructure that standards bodies built over a century.

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