Open standards for open source hardware and other high-cost-of-change domains: the missing framework

In open source software governance doesn’t matter too much – incompetent leadership can simply be replaced via a fork. However, this organic governance has limits: One cannot fork a house. Similarly, governance matters more in domains with a high “cost of change”, like hardware (and also AI), where design decisions can exclude entire regions from replicating, maintaining, or commercializing a project. De jure standardization was a good very answer to this issue 100 years ago, but has seen little procedural innovation since then and is practically unfeasible for open standardization on a product level. The principles of Open Standard on the other hand come with modern workflows, but don’t aim to be representative, so they would be too prone to be compromised by dominant actors.
This talk will outline some of the details of the problem and propose a potential solution aimed at closing this gap.