The utopia of robotic standards

I was reading about CORBA some weeks ago, and I needed to find an equivalent of "CORBA for Dummies". Eventually I found a good one: "CORBA Explained Simply".

The unexpected part of the story is that on that web site I found a course that I believe is even more interesting and valuable: "Skills you need to change the world".

I thought that it is strange that Ciaran Mc Hale, a software developer, would include such a course next to "Java reflection Explained Simply", "Secure Communications Concepts Explained Simply" and "Multi-threaded Performance Pitfalls".

But then I think about myself, the amount of time that I spend studying project management, my effort to understand and manage the "human factor" in projects and I realize that, soon or later, I will write myself few words about it (and it will probably looks strange from someone else prospective).

One of the "lessons" in the Ciaran's course is about utopias and it reminds me very much of one of my current projects. Since April, I have been developing a Wiki that I hope will become a worldwide platform for finding the long awaited (and badly needed) standard middleware for robotics: www.robotic-middleware.org

Most people will say that one person alone can’t achieve such a lofty goal – that I’m tilting at windmills, so to speak. People tell me I can’t just convince people to put down their arguments over who’s invented the best wheel and work together instead.

Even so, I decided to try and I hope that people will join my crusade to define the tools and methodology that will speed up the development of robotics software and its integration into complex systems.

You can find the course's lesson about utopias below. Iff you like it, there are 42 more lessons online :)