A little bit of naiveté, and an anecdote first. The OASIS Board of Directors decided to open its 29 July face-to-face meeting to members, and members did show up. One of them was an esteemed guest from Japan: Mr Eisaku Nishiyama, who, among other responsibilities, reports to Hitachi's Senior Management on the company's involvement in standards bodies.

As the Board proceeded with the election of its new Officers and seated a new Chair, Mr. Peter Brown, and a new Vice-Chair, Mr. Bob Freund (who happens to represent Hitachi on the OASIS Board), Nishiyama-san could not contain his astonishment. As I chatted with him, he said in perfect English and with great conviction: "We have witnessed an historical moment".

The reaction surprised me: because I'm still a little green at the helm, I'm always delighted and a bit intimidated when another captain salutes and admires our OASIS ship. For the Star Trek fans out there, it's like realizing that we're the USS Enterprise, and I ended being Jean-Luc Picard. (Well, I AM French after all).

Historical moment indeed. The geographic and organizational diversity of representation on the OASIS Board is both impressive and refreshing.The Board Chair is a European entrepreneur who launched Pensive, a semantic Web startup, two years ago; the Vice-Chair represents a Japan-based company; and the Executive Director is French. All told, there are three independent Board members (Peter Brown, Paul Knight and Bob Gluschko of Berkeley University); two European and two Asian companies on the Board; and a multiplicity of backgrounds and interests that is seldom found in the standards world.

Of course, if you move the camera from the Board room to the OASIS community at large, then we are looking at 5,000 amazing experts from around the world - but I don't need to tell you that, because it's you I'm talking about.

I credit OASIS' open and transparent nature for the marvelous diversity of our OASIS eco-system. We have a process and rules that may seem intricate or counter-intuitive at times, but are not unlike the ones which made the Canton of Bern an astounding direct democracy since the Middle Ages.

These rules and policies have fostered genuine and transparent
coopetition: the gloves remain on. If you're feeling cynical, you might say: people will still try to game the system and get away with anything they can. All you'd be doing is describing human nature.