Consensus making activities in Europe: The example of multimedia in ACTS

Abstract

Reaching consensus is essential to achieving widespread uptake of results in the field of telecommunications. Consensus involves not just technical agreement but also political acceptance and overall harmony between industry actors. Standards have long been the basis of the world-wide development of any telecommunication service. This continues to be the case in the emerging area referred to as “multimedia∝. The budding multimedia industry is a product of convergence between different industries with different cultures all of which share a future vision which has become known as the “Information Society∝. The task of achieving consensus is becoming greater day-by-day requiring the deployment of dedicated resources and activities. The drive for consensus in defining Information Society occurs within both traditional standards bodies and within the new industry fora. These groups specifically dedicate work items to progress the definition of the Information Society. Information Society consensus is also the subject of specific work in ACTS, and the European Commission, within the framework of the Second Call. ACTS has identified a number of tasks having specific objectives to co-ordinate related activities in different areas of the Programme. Projects responsible for these tasks are referred to broadly as “horizontal projects∝. In general horizontal projects set about defining common positions on topics of interest both for the projects, and for the development of multimedia communications industry in Europe. This paper is a joint effort of individuals from the European Commission and two such horizontal projects involved in the activities of co-ordination of the projects, working on the different aspects of multimedia communication. The objective of the paper is to provide an overview of the current concertation / consensus making activities in ACTS particularly with reference to what is going on in the multimedia sector, especially related to fora such as DAVIC, TINA-C, CORBA, IETF and W3C. In particular the paper develops the idea that “concertation∝ is an inherent feature of ACTS at a number of different levels from policy/regulation to technological detail. The joint effort of all the projects in ACTS with the support of the horizontal projects can be viewed as progressing towards a co-operative system serving both the internal needs of ACTS projects and external needs. External needs are met through the development of so called “guidelines∝ which can be seen as the collective output of the Programme to industry, governments and other important actors who share in the vision of the imminent Information Society.