Standards development is based on several hallmarks such as openness and consensus. Openness means that all individuals can freely express their opinions during meetings and on document approval ballots and that meetings are announced in an open and widely publicized manner. In other words, being transparent. Developing consensus means that unanimity is not the goal but trying to build consensus and using the direction or views of the majority to shape the result is what is needed for consensus. It is also important to understand that in the International standards area, each country that is a member receives one vote no matter how large the country is or how many representatives or subject experts attend meetings.
The United States has representation on many standards committees to ensure that the U.S. industry is appropriately represented. For the information management industry, the US is represented by the technical advisory group administrated by the
3D PDF Consortium for content and document management, PDF, file format, information quality and information integrity standards. With regard to records management standards, standards for libraries, or metadata standards the
National Information Standards Organization administers the group of experts who represent the United States. Groups like these are always in need of subject experts to participate in the review, formation of votes on documents and to attend meetings. The only requirement is that you must have your primary residence in the United States to be a part of a U.S. Technical Advisory Group. Likewise, there are groups like this in other countries. If your primary residence is not in the U.S., we can help you find a group to volunteer in if you would want to do that. As you can see, developing standards involves gaining the opinions of a number of experts and making sure no one expert dominates the thinking or discussion.
Last month, I shared with the AIIM Community that the standards development work was moved to the 3D PDF Consortium. It has taken a little longer than originally expected but all the working documents have been moved and set up for the committees to begin to work. Even though we have not been totally set up, we have continued to review documents and provide US opinions. In the weeks to come, we will be inviting existing experts to join and participate in the work and to begin to use the SharePoint collaborative site. If you are interested in sharing your knowledge and expertise, please feel free to contact me. I will help to get your connected to the correct U.S. Technical Advisory Group or with one of many committees that develop standards.