Is enjoyable standards work a contradiction in terms?

Eric Newcomer says he's enjoyed working in the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group. From my experience of the OSGi Core Platform Expert Group, which has a significant overlap with the EEG, I'd certainly agree.

The defining characteristic of the OSGi Alliance seems to be that the members are there with a fairly clear common purpose. Other standards groups I've been involved in - and I'm not just talking about the JCP - have tended to suffer from divergent objectives among the members.

Maybe the key is that OSGi provides a dynamic component model which is broadly applicable across small devices, PCs, and large servers and that it has strong conceptual integrity making it easy to learn and apply.

I also found Eric's recent InfoQ interview on OSGi futures interesting - take a look.