Been hearing some wranglings over W3C and Consortium standards processes (see links at bottom). While I have not worked in the W3C (not had a company willing to pay for participation), I have worked with a Consortium standards process, namly HR-XML. It seems there are several issues:
- Openness. This is a common complaint of folks outside the Consortium process. And there is validity to it. The problem is that one needs to pay the electric bills too. At HR-XML, we were a globally scoped organization with an extremely small full time staff. We kept barriers as low as possible (such as having individual memberships), but ultimately there are costs that need covering. I'd be more concerned about "how" the Consortium spends its money rather than whether pay-to-play is valid to begin with.
- Diminishing returns. A general pattern for acceptance of standards is shooting for a good "1.1". The first version, 1.0, is the first thing that many people take note of, except the few that worked on it. Getting implementation feedback on 1.0 makes a real good push for a quality 1.1 version. However after that, the law of diminishing returns comes in. The number of problems you solve with 2.0 is often less than the number you solve with the 1.1, and so on. The great base specs, XML, HTML, CSS, XSLT, etc solved many problems. But getting folks excited about working on CSS 5.0 or some such can be hard and not as compelling.
- Reinventing itself. Each year, Consortia need to reinvent themselves to justify to their members why they still need to exist. In essense, one has to constantly re-justify one's existance. So there is a tension between sticking to one's bread and butter and moving on to new ventures. Stray too far from your bread and butter and your membership withers. Don't venture into new territory and members wonder why they fork out fees. Here is a great article on associations .
"Operating a professional or trade association has a number of sisyphusian characteristics. At each step of the organization's evolution, the core staff must deliver more novelty and interesting experiences in order to convey additional value. Each year, the cycle begins anew. The largest risk in the association business is that the enterprise will lose its relevance while navigating the hamster wheel of ongoing operations. The penalty for failure is mediocrity. The reward for success is rarely excellence. It's more like 'a little bit better than mediocrity'. It's a very tough grind."
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Decision by committee. This is used as a derogatory comment, but studies generally find that decisions made by a group are better than those done by individuals. It's the least bad mechanism.
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Democracy or marketshare based influence. Another complaint is that large multinationals disproportionately influence the results. The assumption is that there should be a true democracy. Well, what kind of standards would actually get implemented if a one-person consulting firm has the same say as IBM or Microsoft? Yes a true democracy is an ideal we hope to achieve, but there is a marketplace reality. These larger companies get disproportionate influence because the end result will fail without them. This is leverage. Lack of big multinational support does not mean standards can't succeed, but it would need to be really compelling to overcome this. I'm not saying it "should" be this way or that its fair in any way. It simply is a fact and needs to be shown in the light. A successful Consortium must balance an ideal of democracy with the reality of market share based influence.
It was Churchill that said Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms ...
Here are links to the controversy and responses to it:
blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam
25hoursaday.com/weblog
docuverse.com/blog/
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/08/14/angry-indeed/
5:29:09 PM 
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