May wrap up

Confirmation doc screenshotMay was a fairly uneventful month. I spent most of my time just working on my PhD confirmation document (read the finished draft) and made but a few editorial changes to the Widgets 1.0 Requirements document.

I’m supposed to submit the confirmation soon (on June 13th to be exact). I still have a bit of work to do on it, especially in regards to methodology and a contextual review of widgets and widget engines… a contextual review basically looks at what widgets are, what they do, and what are the forces (markets, usefulness, web 2.0, etc) that are driving the continual popularity of widgets. As one can imagine, the contextual review is an ongoing process.

In regards to the requirements documents, I’ve was quite influenced by a chapter I read from the book Advanced Topics in Information Technology Standards and Standardization Research. In that book, there is a chapter title “Open Standards Requirements”, by Ken Krechmer, that provides a set of criteria for basically deciding if a standard is “open”. I took a few idea and used them in the requirements document to make sure that the standard remains “open” as defined by Krenchmer and that no one company controls it… even if not all widget engine vendors are taking part in the discussion.