How to get involved in the development of the ISO standard

How to get involved in the development of the ISO standard - By Ron Augustin (IPP - August - 2009)

The next two meetings of ISO’s Technical Committee on Graphic Technologies, TC 130, will be held in September 2009 in Beijing and in February 2010 in Miami. Although there are other Technical Committees concerned with our industry, such as TC 6 (paper, board and pulp), TC 42 (photography) and TC 171 (document management applications), participants at the Monsoon Summit on ISO 12647 recently held in three cities across India stressed the need of Indian involvement in TC 130 for a more balanced representation in global print colour perceptions.
If the Indian printing industry is serious about standardisation, it has to act fast and, if the deadline for September is too close, make sure it will be in the February meeting.
The procedure to get there is as follows:

ISO is a network of ‘national bodies’ (NBs), i.e., the national standards institutes of some 160 countries, of which the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) is one. Although participation in ISO is open to all, there is a protocol that must be observed. For each Technical Committee, the NB can choose to be a P (participating) or O (observer) member. TC 130 has around 15 P members and 20 O members. For practical purposes, the TC is divided into working groups (WGs) where most of the standards development work is done and in which there are technical experts participating as individuals nominated by and responsible to their NB. Once an NB has established a relationship with a TC, it identifies the technical experts who will represent it in the various TC and WG activities. The working documents of the various TC projects are made available to these technical experts through the TC Secretariat, usually via access to a secure Internet connection.

As an example, in the USA, ANSI is the official NB in ISO, but has delegated responsibility to various industry groups to monitor US participation in each TC for which the US is either a P or O member. These groups are called Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs). For ISO, each NB is free to manage this process in its own way. The TAGs have the responsibility to recruit technical experts and endorse their participation to the TC Secretariat. Therefore, anyone who wants to participate in the work of a TC must contact the TAG for that TC. The TAG for TC 130 in the US is the Committee for Graphic Arts Technologies Standards, CGATS, which has its Secretariat at the National Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies, NPES. For the Indian industry, it must not be hard to imagine and build a similar structure.