Something I've always wondered about: All of these alliances for this and that format/standard/whatever - do they end up hiring some secretarial staff in some office for several decades? There should be several hundreds active corporate alliances now.
As far as I know: no. It’s people like you and me from the involved companies that are largely responsible for moving things forward (most often in addition to their regular engineering work!) through Working Groups (WG) or Task Sub-Committees (TSC).
Of course, but who's doing the actual admin work?
Who chases the sponsors for cash, who books the events, who collects the member fees, who creates that crappy member web site?
I'm just curious :)