standards development process

[Henry Spencer]

> One of the reasons that few people bother is that ANSI charges large
> sums of money for copies of the standard; last I heard, it was on the
> order of $50.  I think it costs even more to actually join X3J11 (altho 
> I'm not sure)...

X3J11 committee membership costs some nominal amount, $100 or something
like that, after which things like drafts are free.  In fact, being a
member means getting vast mounds of paper for free.  The problem is that
you are supposed to read it all.

The actual cost of being a committee member is mostly (a) expenses for
attending meetings, and (b) the time spent reading (and thinking about)
endless documents.  As I recall, you have the right to vote only if you
attend the (quarterly) meetings fairly regularly.  And you will put your
foot in your mouth with some frequency if you don't make some effort to 
read the endless reams of proposals, comments, and drafts.

Nobody who hasn't tried it can possibly imagine what a grind it is to do
a careful, thorough, line-by-line reading of the latest draft of a complex
technical document, especially when you have already seen 57 earlier drafts
and are thoroughly sick of it.

People who read comp.lang.c will, however, have some grasp of what a grind
it is to have to read, comment on, and shoot down the same old dumb ideas
for the 57th time.  Standards committees have to do a lot of that too.

> If ANSI would allow net distribution, they probably get a lot more response.

There is a real and legitimate debate about (non)availability of machine-
readable copies of the document, but I would observe that ANSI has some
cause for restricting distribution to those who are motivated enough to
make an effort to obtain the document.  It has never been terribly hard
to participate in X3J11 (or whatever) if you really want to.
-- 
"Noalias must go.  This is           |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
non-negotiable."  --DMR              | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry