Only half the seats are filled, because the other attendees are clustered in the hallway, wheeling and dealing in low whispers. It might be the scene of a secret Middle East peace negotiation, but it's not. This is a Standards committee, hammering out agreements that will have an unseen but profound effect on how you use technology. English, for example, is the standard language in this country. It's an unofficial standard, meaning that we use it because everyone else also uses it.
Computer technology relies very heavily on standards in one form or another.
You can cheaply upgrade the parts in your IBM clone because they fit together in a standard way, like the pieces of a Tinker Toy set. On the other hand, you cannot take an Apple Macintosh program and run it on a Windows 95 PC, because there is no standard for how programs operate. Modems must use a common language when they talk to each other. Thanks to this official standard, your 33.6 modem can talk to any other 33.6 modem in the world. By comparison, there is no single standard for 56Kbps modems.