Karl Best has been involved in standards and standards-related activities for over fifteen years, either as a committee participant, chair, administrator, standards organization management, or consultant. He has organized and spoken at numerous industry conferences and events related to standardization.

He was most recently Director of Standards at Kavi Corporation where he advised standards organizations and industry consortia on organizational structure and policies, technical process, and other best practices, and assisted in the design of infrastructure tools for accredited and non-accredited organizations. He was also the author of various white papers and published academic papers on standards practices, and the author of the Kavi blog on Standards Best Practices.

Prior to his work at Kavi he was the Executive Director of the XBRL-US consortium, coordinating the technical and promotional activities related to the XML-based syntax for financial information exchange.

Before XBRL he was a member of the Board of Directors and then later Vice President at OASIS Open. At OASIS he was responsible for the ongoing development, maintenance, and administration of the Technical Committee Process. He also wrote governance and process documents and contributed to the development of the OASIS IPR Policy. He managed the creation and launch of over 70 technical committees, and administered the approval of over 20 OASIS Standards and the submission of some of those Standards to international bodies such as ISO and IEC. He was a member of the joint OASIS/UN-CEFACT coordinating committee for ebXML, and administered the development and later approval of the ebXML specifications as ISO Technical Specification 15000. He was responsible for liaisons with a wide variety of other standards organizations including ISO, ITU, UN-CEFACT, CEN/ISSS, ISO/IEC JTC1, W3C, and ANSI, and was a member of the ISO/IEC/ITU MoU Committee on e-Business.

Karl has long been an advocate of cooperative efforts between standards organizations, especially via the communication of the status of their efforts; he founded and led an ad hoc effort to define a metadata for specifications used to promote cooperation, reduction of duplicative efforts, and increase the participation in and adoption of standards work.

Prior to his work in standards Karl has worked for companies including Novell, Adobe, and Sun in producing electronic delivery systems for documentation and in developer support and training. He earned a B.S. degree in Economics from Brigham Young University in 1983.