Abstract
A primary goal of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance, which brings together Virtual Observatory Projects from 16 national and international development projects, is to develop, evaluate, test, and agree upon standards for astronomical data formatting, data discovery, and data delivery. In the three years that the IVOA has been in existence, substantial progress has been made on standards for tabular data, imaging data, spectroscopic data, and large-scale databases and on managing the metadata that describe data collections and data access services. In this paper, I describe how the IVOA operates and give my views as to why such a broadly based international collaboration has been able to make such rapid progress.