🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BtA8Jx.EMC@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
mskuhn@immd4.informatik.uni-erlangen.de (Markus Kuhn) writes:

}                     ... If it is intended to be a democratic
}process, how can highly motivated independent people (e.g. like me ;-)
}have influence on the standardisation process without being employed in
}the marketing department of a huge company?

As noted by another poster, ISO is a federation of national standards
organizations.  The German member (at least in the realm of OSI) is DIN.
I have no idea how DIN determines whether a particular individual can
become a member of the DIN delegation.  In the US, at least, the member
(ANSI) wants to be sure that each individual knows enough about the
national position on each issue to be able to avoid taking a position
contrary to the national position.  This is generally assured by
requiring that each individual be an active member (attending and
participating in meetings which develop the national position) of the
member organization for a while before going to an ISO meeting.

In addition to formal requirements, it is my experience that in any
committee (not only standards committees) the amount of influence an
individual has is related to how much the other committee members
"respect" the individual (by "respect" I mean  something like "have the
sense that the individual has thought through positions taken, and can
be relied on to work on seeing other points of view and seeking
solutions that satisfy many needs").  This "respect" normally arises
from working with someone over a period of time.

Both the formal and informal "requirements" make it necessary (in my
experience) for an individual to dedicate a lot of time, and do a lot of
international traveling, before having much effect on international
standards.  That probably has the effect of making it impossible for
_most_ highly motivated but independent people to have influence on the
standardisation process.

I should add that my experience with ANSI and ISO was in the early 80's,
but I doubt that anything is significantly different today.

Alex McKenzie