Deep in the heart of Portland or Austin or Minneapolis or any of dozens of towns across the nation and the world, Makers are busily building components for the Internet of Things (IoT). Long dismissed as hobbyists unworthy of sales attention, many of these skilled designers are where the IoT rubber hits the road.

Way on the other end of abstraction, folks in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) have been expending much effort trying to lay out an IoT framework that might promote interoperability and numerous other desirable traits. Many of these abstract characteristics may, at some point, be implemented in a concrete fashion by one of those engineers.

To me, these feel like opposite ends of a spectrum: high ideals for how things should be vs. practical considerations for how things have to be, this time anyway, in order to get a product finished. To be sure, not all IoT design is done by Makers; there’s much happening in large companies too. But the little guy captures, for me, that practical, entrepreneurial garage spirit.

On the abstract side, however, this summer saw the release of an Industrial Internet Reference Architecture. Now, don’t panic… this isn’t a hard standard specifying how to build an IoT. To me, it seems like two things:

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