What open source maintainers told us about standards

The respondents skew European (around 78%), reflecting the networks we were able to reach, a reminder that this isn’t a representative sample of the global maintainer community. 85% of respondents reported that there is ongoing relevant work taking place at a standards body, and 95% said they were interested in contributing to it. These reflect the reality that working on standards development is structurally set up for people with institutional backing: large technology companies that absorb the cost as a strategic investment and whose employees can spend working hours on standards without it coming at the expense of everything else they are responsible for. When asked what enabling factors would matter most, compensation for time spent was rated very important or critical by 65% of respondents, the highest of any factor, followed by travel and attendance funding. These are the roles where implementation experience has the most direct impact on specification quality: reviewing drafts, identifying gaps, and proposing clarifications based on what actually happens when software has to conform to a specification in practice. Their projects span the breadth of critical digital infrastructure: web technologies, networking protocols, identity and authentication systems, data formats, security, and cloud infrastructure.