62 ROUND TABLE Professional Organisations
FEED : Is there a better way of establishing industry standards and specifications than what we are doing now? Barbara Lange, SMPTE: With new communication and collaboration tools, we are always evolving how we develop standards. For more than ten years, SMPTE has used online collaboration tools to manage the process, and today we are using the latest communications tools. I am sure there are improvements we can make to better achieve our goals in the standards and specifications development process, and we are committed to utilising the best, state-of-the-art resources to continue ensuring we make the process as efficient as possible. Mark Harrison, DPP: The ways of communicating via the web have only supplemented the value of human encounter and I think that’s also true for professional bodies. Social media provides all sorts of tools and opportunities to chat in general, but people still do want to come together and chat physically – possibly more than ever. In our busy lives, as we get so fragmented, we need those touchstone moments. The way we approach standards and best practices, all those kinds of things are needed as much as ever. However, I feel we should adapt and modernise our approach to them now, because the industry has changed and the speed of change is so great. Precisely what those appropriate new mechanisms are, how they can be effective and who should be involved in them is something a number of us, specifically SMPTE and DPP, are thinking hard about at the moment. Peter White, IABM: The industry is moving too fast to wait for standards to be established, but this does not mean that standards no longer have a place – in a world where collaboration is ever more important, a common ‘language’ is even more vital. We very much welcome moves from standards bodies such as SMPTE to streamline their procedures to enable vital standards to be ratified and adopted more speedily. The proliferation of bodies established for a particular standard or protocol is not helping the issue: as we are witnessing consolidation in media businesses and in the media technology supply chain we are seeing the proliferation of so-called trade bodies which, in reality, are often just looking after vested interests.
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