Speakers -> Who Needs Standards in an Open Source World? + Standards in Elections: NIST and the Help America Vote Act

QCon San Francisco 2008 Speakers Schedule Tutorials Tracks Social Events Exhibition Sponsors Registration Volunteers Venue Travel Hotels About QCon Contact Archives Future events	Presentation: "Who Needs Standards in an Open Source World? + Standards in Elections: NIST and the Help America Vote Act" Track: Solutions Track - Wednesday Time: Wednesday 15:45 - 16:45 Location: Concordia Abstract: Standards in the Real World What are standards and why are they important? How are they created? How do standards affect you, not just as a software developer but also as a citizen? How can you participate in their development? This track will address these and related questions through a panel discussion and four short presentations touching on many aspects of the standards-development process. From human to computer languages, currency and measurement to food and drink, laws and statutes to voting and elections, website design and equality of access to archeology, digital imaging, and file formats, standards touch our lives every day. These sessions will inform and engage you, and will present standards in a new light. Who Needs Standards in an Open Source World? Standards make the world go round. It would be impossible 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 the modern world offers without standards. The Java platform is built on standards, and its success is directly attributable to the community-driven process through which the language and platform evolve: the Java Community Process program. The acceptance and success of open-source development methodologies pose both a challenge and an opportunity for the JCP program. Are standards necessary in an open-source world? Standards in Elections: NIST and the Help America Vote Act On November 4th, did your vote count? Or is it déjà vu all over again? After the 2000 election, Americans needed assurance that their votes counted and were recorded accurately. Questions of voting system integrity, usability, and security arose. Existing voting standards were inadequate and outdated – in need of revision to reflect advances in the state of the art in both voting systems and in the underlying information technology. The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed by Congress to address these concerns. The goal of HAVA is to ensure that every eligible American has an equal opportunity to cast a vote and have that vote counted. Assuring the reliability, usability, accessibility, and especially, security of current and future voting systems required a new voting systems standard and certification process. HAVA has given The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) a key role in helping to realize nationwide improvements in voting systems with the development of a new voting systems standard. This presentation will highlight the events leading up to the development of this new voting systems standard and provide details of the standard and how it will improve overall voting systems performance for the next generation of voting systems.		Lynne Rosenthal Lynne Rosenthal is the manager of the Information Systems Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Information Technology Laboratory. She is responsible for the development of software conformance test methods for promoting quality development and accelerating implementations and use of information technology. Ms. Rosenthal has developed conformance tests for several standards and currently leads a team of NIST scientists in the development of standards and test methods for U.S. voting systems. She was instrumental in defining the conformance strategy and model for the recent ANSI/Health Level Seven (HL7) Standard for Electronic Health Record Systems. Ms. Rosenthal has been an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), HL7, and the International Standards Organization (ISO) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Technical Committees on Computer Graphics. While a member of these groups, she has co-authored several guidelines and specifications on quality assurance, conformance, and testing. Her most recent publications include, Leveraging a Common Development Framework and Delivery Approaches through Effective Software Management, Software Validation, and How to Guide for Creating Functional Electronic Health Care System Profile. Patrick Curran, JCP 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 here