Full opening of the CITP protocol
As the maintainer of the CITP protocol specification I have received a fair amount of
questions and feedback about it over the past years. A common remark is that the
specification is ambiguous and open for interpretation.
Protocols and standards
The benefit of rigid protocol working groups that hold physical meetings and reviews of
specifications is that all wording and formatting passes the watchful eyes of several
competent people. This helps make such specifications less ambiguous and easier to
interpret as intended.
The disadvantage of said groups is that they easily become rather slow and very excluding, as
few manufacturers in the lighting industry can spare the time and money to put their
engineers on planes with the frequency required.
However, it is much easier for a large enough manufacturer to instruct an employee to sit on an
airplane a few times a year to attend a protocol committee than having said person
allocate a reasonable amount of time to proactively participate in online-based
protocol development work.
CITP contribution
It was always my belief that having an online forum where anyone could post and
discuss changes would be open enough, but it has become clear to me that unless
people have the actual documents in their hands, they will expect the editor
(ie. me) to do all the work for them.
In an effort to be as clear and open as possible, I have now uploaded the CITP
protocol specification to an open Git repository. Henceforth I shall encourage and
instruct everyone with an opinion about the CITP protocol to take action, make the
amendments necessary and submit a pull request!
The goal is and has always been to allow industry developers around the world to
participate on equal terms.
Read more on citp-protocol.org.