Many people have predicted that this year will be huge for adoption of RSS technology.  Even as mass adoption likely approaches, the technical foundation continues to evolve (maybe).  There's a number of controversies going on right now about how that evolution should proceed, but one in particular has just come to my attention.

The question  of who will determine the next iteration of the RSS standard appears to be what's at issue.  RSS  appears to have been created roughly 6 years ago, the latest standard version (RSS 2.0) being released about 3 years ago.  Dave Winer is widely credited as key to the creation of RSS, though his role has been subject of controversy from the technology's inception through today.  Untangling this is a bigger fish than I care to fry, but Winer deserves lots of credit no doubt.

The standards code for RSS 2.0 is now owned by Harvard.  It is held under a Creative Commons licence.  There also exists an RSS Advisory Board and here's where the controversy lies.  Winer says the Advisory Board has been disbanded.  Harvard says the Board has a very conservative mission - to both promote RSS and assist various players in its use.  The Board is now lead by Rogers Cadenhead, who says that the Board has published 6 revisions since 2003 and is working on a seventh.  The Board expanded, "went public," and stated its intent to publish an entirely new specification of the standard in a post on its new site in the end of this January.  In that post, the Board was identified as "an independent organization formed in 2003 that publishes the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, helps developers create RSS applications and broadens public understanding of the format."
Cadenhead has proposed a new standard.  "This new specification," he says, "is dubbed 'Rss-Draft-1' and has not been adopted by the board. It's offered to encourage public review for at least 60 days. The goal of the spec is to make RSS simpler to implement by providing examples for all elements, better presentation and a more formal approach."

Criticism has been leveled against both the particular specifications offered and the Board's right to create a new standard.  There also appears to be broad dissatisfaction with the RSS 2.0 standard as it exists per Harvard.

It's also been said that all parties' opinions will be of much less consequence than the actual practices of  Microsoft and other mass market vendors.  That makes sense, but I guess we'll see.

My take on this: 

I'm not a programmer.  I tell people all the time that I have very limited technical knowledge about these things.  In my experience, however, that's very relative.  I end up being the source of "technical" information for even less technical users in many circumstances.  When people with less technical knowledge than I have refer to me as a technical guy I tell them there are many people who have a fundamentally different level of knowledge about how these things work than I do.  Most of the people involved in this controversy are those people. 

Given the role I play with other users of RSS, however, I think that my perspective cannot be discounted and could benefit from being more informed.  I will only develop so much technical knowledge about this, however, because I am not a programmer - my work is doing other things, including using and teaching others to use RSS. 

My belief is that the Advisory Board, or more appropriately for now Cadenhead, ought to be supported in efforts to develop a new standard.

My experiences regarding this issue:

I have found RSS in a number of cases to be difficult to manipulate (using tools like FeedDigest and blog search engines, for example.)  The expansion of standard name spaces (defined elements in a set of data like a feed) is something that seems to me to be a good idea in order to make feeds more manipulatable.  It is my understanding that this is one of the things Cadenhead seeks to to.

I had a conversation with Dave Winer at Tag Camp several months ago where he told me that RSS feeds for search were not important to him.  This is one of the most important and promising uses of RSS in my mind.  We did not discuss it at length, it seemed to me, because the issue was inconsequential to him.  That makes me inclined to support the inclusion of more people in the process of standards development.  I love RSS, podcasting and OPML, so huge props to Winer, but as things move on other voices are really important.

Most of the technical issues here are over my head, so I'm going to have trust someone.  Based on cursory knowledge I trust Cadenhead and Board member Jon Udell.  It is widely acknowledged that this is a political battle for control, and I trust Cadenhead and Udel's politics to prioritize accessibility and functionality for end users.  Cadenhead largely because of his tangible support for women technologists in Wikipedia and Udel because of his ongoing humility and concern for real world use in both his Infoworld column and his appearances on the Gilmor Gang round table podcast. 

Are these meaningful reasons to support their exercising power in regards to technical questions?  Well, just like my clients decide to trust me to make a good faith effort to provide them with the best service possible based largely on my values and interpersonal communication - so do I have to decide who to trust when a problem appears to need solving with greater technical knowledge than I posses.

Widespread adoption of RSS is, I hope, right around the corner.  I want it to be as ready as it can be for maximum functionality for end users with a variety of goals.  I'm willing to put my trust, for what it's worth, in the hands of Cadenhead and the expanded Advisory Board.