StartingPoint

What is PICA?

The Pro-am Internet Communications Alliance is a hypothetical organization.

"Pro-am" stands for "professional-amateur."

The goal of PICA (pronounced "pika," as in "pikachu") is:

to encourage the development of Internet standards by providing an accessible standards track and by encouraging a community of implementation and support

PICA will not be like other standards organizations, however. PICA's goal is not to set standards. PICA's goal is to raise awareness of emerging standards efforts. PICA's role will be to take a standards proposal from "an idea on someone's blog" to "an emerging standard that lots of people are working on". That's where PICA's role ends, and the role of organizations like the IETF begins.

Another big difference is that PICA will be accessible to pro-ams. PICA membership will be open to individuals, not just corporations, and participation will be cheap enough that every software developer can afford it.

Why PICA?

We think that there are a lot of good ideas for standards out there that simply fail to gather momentum.

See WhyPica for more details.

What precisely will PICA provide?

• a formal submission queue; PICA numbered memo series
• a hub for people to publicize their efforts
  • will include news about non-PICA proposals
  • bulletin board, wiki, mailing list
• a catalog of standards efforts, both PICA and non-PICA
  • including notes on the relationships between various standards
• keeping track of who/how many people ("signees") endorse each standard
  • maybe: a voting or endorsement threshold process to make some of the numbered memos "official PICA standards"
• documentation support
• people willing, even eager, to make their software work with yours
• fun and glory

See WhatPicaWillDo for more details.

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