The federal government is both a regulatory authority and a massive consumer of information technology--a state of affairs that makes its role in setting technology standards problematic, said panelists at a Jan. 25 forum hosted by the Department of Commerce, in Washington, D.C.

Phil Weiser, senior advisor for technology and innovation to the National Economic Council director, described the current standards environment as a "tension" that government and industry must resolve.

"What government can do and should do, is first respect the private, voluntary nature of the standards bodies that we have in the United States," said Mark Chandler, general counsel, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO). "What government can do is then drive more transparency and clarity into that framework as a key feature of growing American success and competitiveness."

Chandler added that government can makes its preference for certain standards felt through its procurement of technology.

But voluntary standards codification and adoption is often spurred by the promise of government action, said some panelists.

"What has been useful is the stick of potential legislation to, frankly, knock some heads together when there is a lack of consensus; to be able to be able to drive this forward with at least the threat that they will legislate something," said said Raj Vaswani, chief technology officer of Redwood City, Calif.-based Silver Spring Networks.

During the panel discussion, Patrick Gallagher, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, announced an extended comment period on a NIST request for information on making the standards process more efficient. Gallagher said NIST is specifically seeking case studies on public-private collaboration in the standards process and examples of how standards impact trade, competitiveness and intellectual property rights. More input is needed in the area of metrics and tracking progress that will lead to continuous improvement in standards, said Gallagher.

The deadline to comment on the "Effectiveness of Federal Agency Participation in Standardization in Select Technology Sectors for National Science and Technology Council's Sub-Committee on Standardization" is now March 7.

For more:
- watch archived video of the event (soon to be posted) at youtube.com/user/nistgov
- see the original NIST RFI on the standards process, which is open for comment

Related Articles:
White House, Commerce prepare for trusted identities in cyberspace
Smart grid cybersecurity standards still lacking, says GAO
Congress approves slimmed-down America COMPETES Act reauthorization
Cloud computing standards already exist, but NIST must make sense of them
NIST kicks off collaborative development of cloud computing roadmap