On 29 March 2007 Species 2000 and ITIS held their ‘One Million Species Day’ celebrating reaching one million species in their Catalogue of Life. This was achieved by federating species checklists from 47 taxonomic databases from around the world. Not only was the Species 2000 programme initiated by TDWG, but from the start in 1996 the programme depended on standards for interoperability within its architecture for federating many taxonomic databases. Then as now, TDWG was considered the community’s forum and authority for standards. So how has TDWG served this client community over the eleven years, and how has this client responded? First – the will of TDWG to establish and promote practical standards as different from acting as a forum for innovation in biodiversity informatics has fluctuated over the years. Second – the early cohort of standards were largely content standards, but these, nonetheless can prove valuable to a programme such as ours. Third – the gradual shift to schemas and protocols at the informatics level has done much to widen the generality of solutions and to open opportunities for multiple uses. Fourth – we need to be realistic about the time-lags between design, adoption, implementation and effective adoption in the community, and where possible to manage this life-cycle rather severely. The response from our species checklist database community has been decidedly mixed. Huge variations in the sense of purpose and in perceptions of how it should be done, have led to some exciting innovations, but also to much needless diversity in how simple tasks are done. Some of the disappointing elements in this response relate to the weak uptake of generic software in our community, and the shortage of success stories in this area. Lastly, with participation of more than 50 databases in the Species 2000 programme, we can bring to TDWG incipient standards that have already proved effective within this community. One is the SPICE Protocol for federating species checklists, another is the Species 2000 Data Content Standard for species checklists, and we have started a ‘best practice’ document that addresses content and management. On behalf of both the Species 2000 and the ITIS programmes it is important to re-iterate both the fundamental importance of interoperability standards, and the work that TDWG is doing. Nowhere are standards more important than in biodiversity. Our ability to describe, model and manage global biodiversity depends entirely on our ability to synthesise high level knowledge from the myriad individual observations and syntheses made independently around the world: distributed systems and interoperability are central to this task.