Open source has had significant impact on how work practices for development and deployment of software and has thereby transformed the way of working in the domain of software. From a review of the literature and current activities amongst policy makers and standardisation organisations it is evident that there is potential for utilising open source work practices for improved standardisation processes in the domain of standards. This paper presents three principle contributions. First, we clarify core concepts and elaborate on work related to how organisations seek to utilise open source software for developing standards. Second, we present opportunities and challenges for how open source work practices can be used for development of IT-standards. Third, for different standardisation organisations we illustrate through a review of existing open source projects implementing standards provided by three different standardisation organisations how those projects have contributed to development and governance of each standard. We find that open source work practices may contribute to improved standardisation processes and thereby constitute an effective strategy for improved standardisation.