Starting an international standard

Gary S Robinson

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 1998)

Recently I received e-mail from a standards developer asking me how to make an IEEE standard into an international standard. I explained that the procedure used to develop international standards was very difficult and secret. The reason I gave for this secrecy was that I wanted to guarantee that when we standards experts retire, we could enjoy gainful employment as consultants on international standards development. Of course, I was joking. The process is actually very simple and, except in unusual cases, fast. However, this e-mail exposed a big problem: not many people from the US are involved in international standards, and few written instructions on the process of starting them exist. The current method of training involves mentoring. If you're interested in the international process, you bounce around for a while, find the right committee, and then attend meetings, all the while learning on the job. So I thought it might be useful to take some time in this column, which has a fairly wide distribution among potential standards developers, to describe the actual process. The first step, which my e-mail sender has already passed, is to recognize the need for an international standard.