standards development process

[Michael Meissner]

In article <12960 at brl-adm.ARPA> dsill at NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
| Are comments the only form of input a non-ANSI member has to an ANSI
| committee/standard?  The comments are a good idea, but X3J11 is not
| bound use them.  It seems like a public ballot would be reasonable.
| Isn't that what IEEE does?

ANSI makes the rules, the individual technical commitee (X3J11 in this
case) doesn't.  The rules go something as follows:

    1)	A technical committee is formed for a specific purpose

    2)	The technical committee works until it has a draft for public
	review.

    3)	Said draft is sent out for public review, and published by ANSI.
	The first review period is ~4 months, and additional review
	periods are then 2 months.

    4)	Anybody interested writes their comments and sends them to the
	committee.

    5)	All letters received must be answered.  The answer either yes or
	no, but it must be answered.  If in doing so, any substantive
	changes are made to the document, go back to step 2 (editorial
	changes such as spelling mistakes, etc. don't count).

Additionally there is a review by the parent committee (X3).  I'm not
sure whether this is in parallel with the public review, or after the
public review.  To be on the X3 review, the cost is several thousand
dollars, and you have to promise to review all documents within two
weeks of getting it (and you have to review ALL ANSI X3 documents, on
things like tape formats, character sets, etc.).  Note that for a
technical committee and X3, each organization (ie, a company, government
agency, etc.) can only have one voting member at any one time, as well
as an alternate, who can only vote officially when the prinicipal member
is not present.

The highest level of review is the ISO level, where each country gets
one vote (it's standardization body).  C is going through the
standardization for ANSI (U.S.A standard) and ISO at the same time,
which is fairly common these days.

IEEE is a different standards body, and has quite different rules.  The
public balloting procedures are different, as well as the assumption
that each person votes as an individual, not as an organization
representative.  Also, IEEE tends to stress reaching concensus, rather
than 2/3 votes like ANSI does.  (I'm not as familar with IEEE voting
rules, as with ANSI, I do know the Pascal standard was delayed by at
least a year because it tried to be both an ANSI and an IEEE committee
at the same time).

Each system has it's pluses and minuses, but like anything else, once
you are in the system, you pretty much have to abide by the system's
rules.
-- 
Michael Meissner, Data General.		Uucp: ...!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!meissner
					Arpa/Csnet:  meissner at dg-rtp.DG.COM