The IETF is a successful counter-example -- email is the only way any decision can be made, meetings are optional, and no decision made at any meeting is binding until consensus occurs on the mailing list to confirm it. I'm hesitant to comment further about GMPI and its chances for success or failure, because I've been too busy trying to finish RTP MIDI to keep a close eye on it. My only worry stems from a common IETF belief -- that the standards process is a great way to polish and reach consensus on a substantially complete design, but using the standards process as the vehicle to do the design is a much harder road to hoe. A good example of this is 801.11, which was an incredibly long and painful experience because many parties brought bits and pieces of wireless Ethernet to the IEEE table. Only the inherent goodness of the core idea (packet radio) kept everyone at the table to eventually produce a standard that could be interoperably deployed (801.11b, aka Wi-Fi, and its lettered follow-ons). ------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Lazzaro -- Research Specialist -- CS Division -- EECS -- UC Berkeley lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro -------------------------------------------------------------------------