Lukas Smith has voiced some of his own opinions on the Standards Group from an outsider's point of view (Lukas is a well-known member of the PHP community but not a part of the Standards Group).

There is currently a heated debate spawned with the creation and subsequent announcement of a more or less final decision made by a select group of people at php|tek. Now I am a friend of openness, but I have a hard time remembering any significant existing project within the PHP community that actually changed its coding guidelines.

He goes on to talk about PEAR, its implementation of its own coding standards and, in his opinion, one of the major mistakes made by the Standards Group - publishing their mailing list under the php.net groups. Check out the comments for more great thoughts from other community members.