Standards: who cares? (why care)?

Being an Illustrated Guide to Events of Significance in the Regulation of Social and Scientific Affairs from the Earliest Period to the Present Day, Showing their Effects in Human Progress, including a Proposal for Further Advancement under the Leadership of the Duke of Java.

Standards are the foundation of the modern world. It would not be possible to mail a package or send an email message, drive a car or take an airplane trip, shop for food in a supermarket, obtain medical treatment in a hospital, watch TV or movies, enjoy a sports game, or do any of the other things that the modern world offers if it weren't for standards.

Java is built on standards, and its success is directly attributable to the community-driven process through which the language and platform are evolved. The Java Community Process (JCP) is your standards organization. It's not just for platform implementors and large corporations. The views of individual developers and the open-source community matter, and you can directly influence Java's future by joining the JCP and by participating in its activities. We'll tell you how...

Patrick Curran is Chair of the JCP. In this role he oversees the activities of the JCP Program Office including driving the process, managing its membership, guiding specification leads and experts through the process, leading the Executive Committee meetings, and managing the JCP.org web site. Patrick has worked in the software industry for more than 20 years and at Sun for 15 years. He has a long-standing record in conformance testing, and most recently led the Java Conformance Engineering team in Sun's Client Software Group. He was also chair of Sun's Conformance Council, which is responsible for defining Sun's policies and strategies around Java conformance and compatibility.
Patrick has participated actively in several consortia and communities including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (member of the W3C's Quality Assurance Working Group, co-chair of the W3C Quality Assurance Interest Group), and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) (co-chair of the OASIS Test Assertions Guidelines Technical Committee). Patrick maintains a blog at http://blogs.sun.com/pcurran/