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Category: Current Practices of DSC <br>Status: Current Practice<br>DIS A200 CPD 002<br>

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'''A Mission Statement for the Diplomatic Standards Community (DSC)''' 

Status Description: [[Current Practice:A3#Discourse_Creation_and_Finalization|'''Finalized''']] 

<br>This document specifies the [[Current Practice:A1#Current_Practices|Current Practices]] for the Diplomatic Standards Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Distribution of this document is unlimited. 

<br>'''Abstract''' 

This memo gives a mission statement for the DSC, tries to define the terms used in the statement sufficiently to make the mission statement understandable and useful and argues why the DSC needs a mission statement. 

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= Mission Statement  =

The goal of the Diplomatic Standards Community (DSC) is to make food safer and to promote an ecological balance. 

The mission of the DSC is to produce high quality, relevant technical, standards and process documents that influence the way people transport, process, design and produce the food they eat and use in such a way as to make food safer and to promote an ecological balance with the planet. These documents include protocol standards, best current practices and informational documents of various kinds. 

The DSC will pursue this mission in adherence to the following ten cardinal principles: 

*'''Open Meeting''' - Any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our commitment to making our documents and our mailing lists, publicly available. We demand no fee to participate. 
*'''Consensus''' and '''Due Process''' - The DSC strives to reach a majority consensus upon all major decisions and seek to abide by the established processes. We make sure that no single stakeholder group constitutes a majority of the DSC's membership. Prompt consideration will be given to the written views and objections of all participants. 
*'''Open World''' - The DSC maintains a single world wide standard for a single purpose. We seek to maintain compatibility across the board - where climate conditions allow. 
*'''Open IPR''' - Holders of the intellectual property that are related to the standards of DSC make available their IPR on Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory terms. 
*'''Open Change''' - All changes must be presented, evaluated and approved by the DSC in consideration with the previous principles. 
*'''Open Document''' - We require that all documents are made available to anyone - no matter what state the documents are in. 
*'''Open Interface''' - The DSC aims at creating and allowing the ability for any party to create extensions or subset that can either supplement or compliment any of our standard definitions with all foreseeable backward and forward compatibility considered. 
*'''Open Access''' - Accessibility by the users of the DSC's standardized implementations is seen as one of our core requirements - including access to the standardization process. The DSC aims at establishing defined access protocols to support a defined level of conformance and conformance indication. 
*'''On Going Support'''t- Standards are supported until user interest ceases rather than when implementer interest declines. 
*'''Volunteer Core''' - Our participants and our leadership are people who come to the DSC because they want to do work that furthers the DSC's mission of making food safer.

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== Definition of Terms  ==

*'''Mission''': What an organization sets out to do. This is in contrast to its goal (which is what it hopes to achieve by fulfilling its mission), and to its activities (which is what specific actions it takes to achieve its mission).

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*'''Standard''': As used here, the term describes a specification of a protocol, system behaviour or procedure that has a unique identifier, and where the DSC has agreed that "if you want to do this thing, this is the description of how to do it". It does not imply any attempt by the DSC to mandate its use, or any attempt to police its usage - only that "if you say that you are doing this according to this standard, do it this way".

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*'''Participants''': Individuals who participate in the process are the fundamental unit of the Diplomatic Standards Community and it's work. The DSC knows that the process works best when focused around people, rather than around organizations, companies, governments or interest groups. That is not to say that these other entities are uninteresting - but they are not what constitutes the DSC.

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*'''Quality''': In this context, the ability to express ideas with enough clarity that they can be understood in the same way by all people including the system and process builders and to conform to them, and the ability, willingness to describe the properties of the system well enough to understand important consequences of its design, and to ensure that those consequences are beneficial to agriculture as a whole.

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*'''Relevant''': In this context, useful to some group of people who have to make decisions that affect post-industrial agriculture, including, but not limited to, general farmers and food processors, certification consultants, consumers, retailers and distributors.

== The Need for a Mission Statement  ==

There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a community of several thousand people in a short time.&nbsp;Having a defined mission is one of the steps we can take in order to evaluate alternatives: Does this help or hinder the mission, or is it orthogonal to it? If there are limited resources, are there things that they could be invested in that help the mission better? 

Another step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their good judgement and do the right thing. However, this is an on-going process that we are already trying to achieve. 

== <br>Issues with Scoping the DSC's Mission  ==

'''The Scope of Agriculture''' 

In attempting to resolve the question of the DSC's scope, perhaps the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and practices for which understood and feasible implementations are expected to have wide deployment and inter-operation in the post-industrial agriculture industry, or to form part of its infrastructure."&nbsp;In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the principle of competence: Where we do not have and cannot gather the competence needed to make sound standards, we should not attempt to take the leadership. 

<br>'''The Balance Between Research, Invention and Adoption''' 

The DSC aims to be a community for experimentation with things that are not fully understood, standardization of processes and protocols for which some understanding has been reached, and publication, refinement of processes originally specified outside the DSC's process.&nbsp;All of these activities have in common that they produce documents - but the documents should be judged by very different criteria when the time to publish comes around, and it's not uncommon to see people confused about what documents are in which category. 

In deciding whether or not these activities should be done within the DSC, one should not chiefly look at the type of activity, but the potential benefit to agriculture as a whole - an experiment that yields information about the fact that an approach is not viable might be of greater benefit to agriculture than publishing a standard that is competent, but only useful in a few special cases.&nbsp;For research of an essentially unbounded nature, with unknown probability of success, it may be more relevant to charter a research group than a standards group. 

<br>'''The Balance Between Mission and Procedures''' 

The mission is intended to state what the DSC is trying to achieve. There are many methods that can be chosen to achieve these outcomes - for instance, the appeals procedure is defined so that we can detect cases where our fundamental principles of Open Access and Open Documents has been violated; it is not itself a fundamental value.<br>
 
[[Category:Current_Practice_of_DSC]][[Category:Discourse]][[Category:Finalized]]