Sam Ruby knows a thing or two about the difficulties of open, large-scale collaboration around standards issues that effect online technologies. He has rather bravely navigated the political and personal minefield that was the PIE/ECHO/ATOM negotation process to derive a successor to RSS for weblog syndication.

He has learned some useful lessons along the way, and at ETCON he shared these via the medoum of a simple, but characteristically well-structured presentation: XMLConf: ETCON 2004.

Most of us will thankfully be dealing with smaller, simpler and less geek-fuelled debates than this, but nonetheless Sam's reflections on the relative merits of different tools and approaches are most welcome.