Identifying stakeholders is usually mentioned as an important part of any change program, or any project that impacts a diverse range of people. Standards come under both these descriptions. Implementing standards is about improving the way work is done and enabling people or organizations to work together. So stakeholder identification must be an important priority.
Except, I submit, everybody is potentially a standards stakeholder. User groups for standards are almost by definition large. Standards also encourage the growth of the population using them. This means standards movements have to include very large numbers of people.
Is this possible? In order to make standards development practical, we tend to use a kind of representative democracy. We draft interested experts from across the domain to bring their knowledge, champion their colleagues, and constructively critique each other's viewpoints. When it comes to standards deployment, we often have to recruit a new set of representatives or at least augment the current representatives with additional leaders.
We therefore have two sets of stakeholders: Those who are invested in the creation of a good, robust set of standards, and those that realize the undoubted benefits for standards. Ultimately both groups are motivated by the impulses that standards users will share: The desire to make life better, save money, grow the business, and compete.
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