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Comment by csexton | Hacker News Reader

This is something we at Radius Networks are trying to figure out. We've been committed to open source for a while and wanted to get the proposal published -- but are actively researching how to properly establish this spec.

Do you have examples of organizations or communities that have good answers to your questions?

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I don't know that I'm asking questions here, but I don't really understand an "open source spec" -- public specs are public, there isn't really source to a spec.

You're asking for a community RFC on a spec, but have not specified how the good ideas will come forward, who will be voting on them, etc. If it's just your company as the "voting party," it's not very open either.

This just leaves the Radius Networks spec for beacons.

I think the answer would be to propose the beacon to be part of the Bluetooth SIG specifications. Any group of 3 companies in good standing in the Bluetooth SIG (adopter or above) can propose this to the SIG. This is called a New Work Proposal. This can then be taken up by a Study group/working group to actually get the specifications adopted by the Bluetooth SIG.

This is the link to the NWP: https://www.bluetooth.org/docman/handlers/DownloadDoc.ashx?d... (Requires login and you need to be a Bluetooth SIG member)

Edit: This may be a better link as it shows the dcouments available in the Bluetooth SIG. https://www.bluetooth.org/en-us/specification/reference-publ...

I've done quite a lot of thinking about how governance boards could work (or not) for mobile-based projects.

The short answer is that sitting on a governance board takes time and effort, and mobile developers at large aren't really convinced of the benefit (relative, to, say, the Debian advisory boards).

To overcome this you'd need to recruit from people invested in the problem. Probably your competitors.

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