MUMPS Standards Organization
Awakening MUMPS Standardization
from an Eight-Year Dormancy
from an Eight-Year Dormancy
Why Standard MUMPS Matters
Standard MUMPS is the foundation of VISTA. Without it, VISTA's future is a dead end. Standard MUMPS encourages vendor competition and innovation by guaranteeing a market for newcomers, and that in turn encourages portability, fair pricing, and motivated support. Standard MUMPS makes VISTA's portability so good that the "portability" touted by most software vendors does not deserve the word. The portability of standard MUMPS let VISTA adopters surf the hardware revolution to faster, cheaper, and more powerful systems. And the MUMPS standardization process itself let VISTA adopters influence the evolution of the language to guarantee it continued to meet their changing needs.The Status Quo
Authority for MUMPS standardization currently resides with the MUMPS Development Committee, but the committee is stuck in limbo because its sponsoring organization, the M Technology Association, shut down without moving the MDC to another sponsor, and the VA pulled the MDC's funding, leaving it financially helpless. The most recent MUMPS standard is twelve years old, and numerous portability features need to be expanded to make room for the growth of standard MUMPS-based systems such as VISTA.The Sleeper Awakes
The MDC's hibernation is ending. Over the last eight years the chair and vice-chair of the MDC together with some dedicated members have developed a plan to resume the MUMPS standardization process and have consulted with other MDC experts to fine-tune the plan. We are ready.Building a Better Standardization Process
Even at its peak, the MDC processes were slow, expensive, difficult, and emotionally exhausting. During the MDC's long hibernation, the chair and vice-chair have created a new set of processes that keeps the best of the MDC's historic procedures while replacing the rest with procedures designed to make MUMPS standardization faster, cheaper, easier, and more enjoyable, while better steering MUMPS standardization away from the kinds of gratuitous changes that frustrated MUMPS implementors and more firmly toward the smaller number of changes most needed by standard-MUMPS users. Many of the top-priority changes have already been implemented by vendors and just need to be accepted into the standard.Passing the Torch
Because the MUMPS Development Committee's own bylaws and tangled situation have produced a financial and procedural limbo from which it cannot free itself, the chair and vice-chair are launching a new organization to bear responsibility for MUMPS standardization: the MUMPS Standards Organization (MSO), an autonomous committee of the VISTA Expertise Network. The officers of the new MSO will be the current officers of the MDC to guarantee a continuity of leadership and to demonstrate that this move represents the will of the MDC leadership. At the MSO's second meeting (dates to be announced, but probably first quarter 2008), existing MDC members and other interested parties will be invited to become charter members of the MSO. The MSO will then fund the cost of holding one last MDC meeting the following day, at which the MDC membership will vote first to transfer the authority for MUMPS standardization to the new organization and second to formally dissolve the MDC. The rest of the day will be spent holding a celebration of the MDC's thirty-four-year history. The MSO will then meet the following two days to accept the responsibility for MUMPS standardization and begin the work.Download Chairman Arthur B. Smith's Presentation
On Friday, June 15th, 2007, at the Fifteenth VISTA Community Meeting in Seattle, Washington, MDC Chairman Arthur B. Smith gave a presentation reviewing the history and future of standard MUMPS entitled The Rise and Fall and Rise (Hopefully) of Standard MUMPS. Click here to download the presentation in Portable Document Format version 1.7