Off to China

Well, as Dara says, Lou Dobbs wouldn't be very happy about it, but I am going to China on Monday. To further infuriate Lou, I'm going under the auspices of the United Nations Development Program. One of the things my group does is work on standards. It involves sitting in lots of committees deciding how things made by different companies should fit together. In the hardware world, this is what makes makes monitors from different companies work with the same computer, and so on. In the software world, a lot of it revolves around how one program talks with another. Normally these interactions are done in standards-setting organizations, and in the US these organizations scrupulously shun government involvement. Businesses who participate strive to keep government out of the equation, because what they're trying to do is find ways to compete based on their implementations, but agree on standards to be able to expand their marketplace. In China, the European Union, and other places, governments are very active in their role in setting standards. This will be a meeting that includes representatives from businesses and governments trying to address interoperability of software. Three days of meetings to look forward to. Flying back I leave on Saturday at noon and arrive back in SFO Saturday at 8:30AM. Back to the future!