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Face to face

Last week we had a three day Face to Face meeting of the group working on the SOA Reference Architecture.

On the whole it was a very civilized affair, no voices were heard raised in anger. Although some pretty hard decisions and comments went down.

Personally, I think that, if we can keep the momentum going, this architecture is going to be one that we are proud of.

Of particular interest to me is making sure that human actions are properly represented. This is not yet another IT architecture.

To do this, I think that you need to embrace the fact that the overwhelming majority of action will be directed by people, at people, and involving people.

On a technical note, I am pretty convinced that we need to incorporate norms and institutions. A norm is just a rule about how people should behave and what the meaning of that behavior is. An institution is just a fancy name for a social structure -- it can include everything from a fishing club, a company, through to the US government as defined by the constitution.

Architecturally, that just means that concepts such as stakeholders, roles, rights, responsibilities are properly identified. The security folk like that too, because it gives the needed anchor for trusted systems.

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