To condense and stereotype a great deal, there are three general ways ofcreating standards:

• invention , where you come up with something that seems good frommore or less scratch (ie, not feeling obliged to pay any attentionto existing practice, if there is any).

  The risk of this approach is getting your standard adopted in thefield; many invented standards fail dismally because no one isinterested in implementing them.

  The Atom syndication feed format is, I believe, an example of thisway.

• documentation , where

Here's a question: what would a 'modern' university email system looklike, one that's in line with the 'students already have online lives'theme of last entry ?

(Let's assume that our assignment is limited to designing the emailsystem, and thus we don't get to question or change what it's used for.)

Clearly, a lot of people will already have outside email addresses andmany of them will want to just forward their university email addressto their

There's a lot of services that people build around the university, bothlarge and small . The general habit isto make them self-contained services that run on your own web site orwhatever, or perhaps ones that integrate with other on-campus systems.

I have come to believe that this is a mistake. These days, universityservices should be assuming that students (both undergraduates andespecially graduate students) will show up to the university withalready established online identities and habits, which means thatservices should