When amateurs dabble

When amateurs dabble in technology we see all sorts of things happen. Some are amazingly good, the Arduino would be an example of that. From small beginnings a group of hackers and hobbyists have changed the face of microprocessor learning and development. A true paradigm shift.

But for the last few months I have spent many hours working to try and bring some sanity to the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association) standards discussion over a model railway layout control mechanism they want to sponsor called NMRAnet.

The development of the scheme was to be co-operative, but never open. However in the end the brother of the Standards Manager for the organisation left the co-operative discussion and took no further part in the working group established by volunteers to develop the scheme. This same former member of the working group then had his brother modify the documents submitted by the working group to include his own favoured changes. Sadly they were generally ill-considered and had the backing of nobody in the working group.

So now we stand at an impasse, two versions of the documents will be put to the board of directors. We wonder which will survive, the original which is sound, rigorous and based on ISO and other standards, or the modified, crippled version, which removes several of the most basic safeguards to the reliability of the network.

Who knows, buyt in teh past it seems tat no matter how ill advised the changes unilaterally proposed by the Standards Manager they have been accepted. Lets hope the NMRA Board of Directors changes their minds this time.

The NMRA and NMRAnet - a broken standards development process

Unless you know me, you wouldn't know that I love model railways and I have been playing with them one way or another since the early 70's. A couple of years ago I developed for myself a concept of hardware mimicking the object oriented software approach. In theory it works nicely. So I went in search of a networking technique to support what I wanted.

I am not sure how, but I teamed up with a guy from New Zealand (a professional programmer and accomplished embedded software developer) and one from British Columbia (a medical Doctor of all things with a CS degree before his time in medicine and a life long interest in modelling too. Turns out they also had some ideas about this sort of thing too. Then we got hijacked. Some other people started to participate in the list and decided that cheap, simple, unscalable and ready tomorrow technology is all that the model railroad industry and hobby needs.

Then someone tried to float a standard into the National Model Railroad Association (of the USA) to create an NMRA approved standard. So a working group was established. Sheesh! What an experience.

Since its founding just over 12 months ago the group has been a shambles to say the least. One group, form the UK with some USA participation, has gone off to develop things their own way. Others have been unhappy with the behaviour of some members. Now one participant with a very clear idea of what is needed (his proposal) has managed to get the Chairman sacked and he has been appointed in his place! Two weeks ago the working group had I think 18 members. Yesterday, after my departure it had ten and of those only three or four have made any contribution at all to the discussion and it seems that two of those are not happy with what is happening either!

So the group is going well and moving forward by all accounts of the new chairman. I suppose he has nobody left to argue with him and he seems to have perfected the "management of the standards process by attrition". Oh well, back to the grindstone. After twelve months of sniping, back biting, and a lot of ill feeling we can now get back to work!

Our little group seems to be re-forming. We are talking comfortably about where we see something going and about the uses of modern technology. A far cry from what we had been putting up with for the last year.