Canonical, GE Partner on Crowdsourced IoT Standards for Smart Home

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, joined forces with GE this week in announcing a new part of its strategy for leading in the open source Internet of Things (IoT) market: developing "crowdsourced" IoT standards to ensure compatibility between Internet-connected devices.

The announcement, which Canonical posted on its website Sept. 22, noted that the IoT market lacks accepted standards. Without them, it's difficult for developers to write code that will work on hardware from different vendors, for hardware to be updated and so on.

That's not a new observation. There's already been plenty of discussion about lack of IoT standards.

But what makes Canonical and GE's take on the issue different is that the companies are championing a crowdsourced approach to developing standards, rather than calling for a standards body to develop them in a formal, centralized way. In other words, to use one of the oldest metaphors of open source thinking, Canonical and GE want to rely on the bazaar to develop IoT standards in an ad-hoc fashion, instead of adopting a cathedral-style process.

Faced with a lack of standards, Canonical said, "the regular approach would be to create a new standardization group to solve these questions." It added, "Unfortunately, there are too many standards and standardization groups as it is, and most don’t deliver on their promise of an easy-to-use solution with large adoption."

To encourage the crowdsourcing of standards, Canonical and GE—along with FirstBuild, an initiative supported by GE that is focused on new designs for the smart home—plan to launch "a series of contests and a crowdfunding campaign." Specific details or examples of the plans have yet to be announced.

Once the crowdsourcing process has produced standards, they will be "published on github and open sourced," according to Canonical, for anyone to use them.

On balance, there is one big potential problem with the plan that Canonical and GE have laid out: It doesn't make very clear how the companies propose to make everyone use the standards. With so many alternatives out there as the IoT market grows, it's no sure thing that vendors and developers outside of Canonical, GE and FirstBuild will adopt the crowdsourced standards that emerge from this initiative.

Still, new ideas on the IoT standards front can't hurt. And there is a decent chance that crowdsourced, community-developed standards will fare better in the market than those that standards bodies attempt to impose in a top-down fashion.