v  The International Organization for Standardization, widely known as ISO, is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on February 23, 1947, the organization promulgates world-wide industrial and commercial standards.

v  It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

v  While ISO defines itself as a non-governmental organization, its ability to set standards that often become law, either through treaties or national standards, makes it more powerful than most non-governmental organizations.

v  In practice, ISO acts as a consortium with strong links to governments.

v  The organization’s logos in its two official languages, American English and French, include the letters ISO, and it is usually referred to by these letters.

v  ISO is not, however, an acronym for the organization’s full name in either official language. Rather, the organization adopted ISO based on the Greek word ἴσος (isos), which means equal.

v  Recognizing that the organization’s initials would be different in different languages, the organization’s founders chose ISO as the universal short form of its name. This, in itself, reflects the aim of the organization: to equalize and standardize across cultures.

v  ISO’s main products are the International Standards.

v  ISO also publishes

o    Technical Reports,

o    Technical Specifications,

o    Publicly Available Specifications,

o    Technical Corrigenda, and

o    Guides

v  The ITU Telecommunication StandardizationSector (ITU-T) coordinates standards for telecommunications on behalf of the International Telecommunication Union(ITU) and is based in Geneva, Switzerland.

v  The standardization work of ITU dates back to 1865, with the birth of the International Telegraph Union. It became a United Nations specialized agency in 1947, and the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT), was created in 1956. It was renamed ITU-T in 1993.

v  ITU has been an intergovernmental public-private partnership organization since its inception and now has a membership of 191 countries (Member States) and over 700 public and private sector companies as well as international and regional telecommunication entities, known as Sector Members and Associates, which undertake most of the work of the Sector.

v  ITU-T has a permanent secretariat, the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), based at the ITU HQ in Geneva, Switzerland. The elected Director of the Bureau is Mr. Malcolm Johnson of the UK. Mr. Johnson was elected by the ITU Membership to the Directorship for a 4-year term in November 2006.

v  The ITU-T mission is to ensure the efficient and timely production of standards covering all fields of telecommunications on a worldwide basis, as well as defining tariff and accounting principles for international telecommunication services.

v  The international standards that are produced by the ITU-T are referred to as “Recommendations” (with the word ordinarily capitalized to distinguish its meaning from the ordinary sense of the word “recommendation”), as they only become mandatory when adopted as part of a national law.

v  Since the ITU-T is part of the ITU, which is a United Nations specialized agency, its standards carry more formal international weight than those of most other standards development organizations that publish technical specifications of a similar form.

v  The American National Standards Institute or ANSI (pronounced /ˈænsiː/) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States.

v  The organization also coordinates U.S.standards with international standards so that American products can be used worldwide.

v  For example, standards make sure that people who own cameras can find the film they need for them anywhere around the globe.

v  ANSI accredits standards that are developed by representatives of standards developing organizations, government agencies, consumer groups, companies, and others. These standards ensure that the characteristics and performance of products are consistent, that people use the same definitions and terms, and that products are tested the same way. ANSI also accredits organizations that carry out product or personnel certification in accordance with requirements defined in international standards.

v  The organization’s headquarters are in Washington, DC. ANSI’s operations office is located in New York City.

v  ANSI was formed in 1918 when five engineering societies and three government agencies founded the American Engineering Standards Committee (AESC). The AESC became the American Standards Association (ASA) in 1928. In 1966, the ASA was reorganized and became the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI). The present name was adopted in 1969.

v  The ASA (American Standards Association) photographic exposure system became the basis for the ISO film speedsystem, currently used worldwide.

v  The original standard implementation of the programming language C was standardized by ANSI, becoming the well-known ANSI C.

v  In Microsoft Windows, the phrase “ANSI” refers to the Windows ANSI code pages (even though they are not ANSI standards). Most of these are fixed width, though some characters for ideographic languages are variable width. Since these characters are based on a draft of the ISO-8859series, some of Microsoft’s symbols are visually very similar to the ISO symbols, leading many to falsely assume that they are identical.

v  The ANSI/APSP (Association of Pool & Spa Professionals) standards used for pools, spas, hot tubs, barriers, and suction entrapment avoidance.

v  The ANS for eye protection is Z87.1, which gives a specific impact resistance rating to the eyewear. This standard is commonly used for shop glasses, shooting glasses, and many other examples of protective eyewear.

v  The IEEE corporate office is on the 17th floor of 3 Park Avenuein New York City

v  The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (read i triple e) is an international non-profit, professional organization for the advancement of technology related to electricity. It has the most members of any technical professional organization in the world, with more than 360,000 members in around 175 countries.

v  The IEEE is incorporated in the State of New York, United States. It was formed in 1963by the merger of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, founded 1912) and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, founded 1884).

v  The major interests of the AIEE were wire communications (telegraph and telephony) and light and power systems. The IRE concerned mostly radio engineering, and was formed from two smaller organizations, the Society of Wireless and Telegraph Engineers and the Wireless Institute. With the rise of electronicsin the 1930s, electronics engineers usually became members of the IRE, but the applications of electron tube technology became so extensive that the technical boundaries differentiating the IRE and the AIEE became difficult to distinguish. After World War II, the two organizations became increasingly competitive, and in 1961, the leadership of both the IRE and the AIEE resolved to consolidate the two organizations. The two organizations formally merged as the IEEE on January 1, 1963.

v  The International Telecommunication Union is an international organization established to standardize and regulate international radio and telecommunications. It was founded as the International Telegraph Union in Paris on May 17, 1865. Its main tasks include standardization, allocation of the radio spectrum, and organizing interconnection arrangements between different countries to allow international phone calls — in which regard it performs for telecommunications a similar function to what the UPU performs for postal services. It is one of the specialized agencies of the United Nations, and has its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, next to the main United Nations campus.

v  The ITU is made up of three sectors:

o    The Telecommunication Standardization Sector, ITU-T, whose secretariat is the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau or TSB, known prior to 1992 as the International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative Committee or CCITT

o    The Radio communication Sector, ITU-R, whose secretariat is the Radio communication Bureau or BR, known prior to 1992 as the International Radio Consultative Committee or CCIR (from its French name “Comité consultatif international des radio communications”);

o    The Telecommunication Development Sector, ITU-D, whose secretariat is the Telecommunication Development Bureauor BDT, created in 1992.

v  A permanent General Secretariat, headed by the Secretary General, manages the day-to-day work of the Unionand its sectors.

 

v  The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standard bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IPand Internet protocol suite. It is an open standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and leaders are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSignand the U.S.government’s National Security Agency.

v  It is organized into a large number of working groups and informal discussion groups (BoF)s, each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then shut down. Each working group has an appointed chair (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce.

v  The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group(IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF.

v  The IETF is formally an activity under the umbrella of the Internet Society. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity(IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.

v  The first IETF meeting was on January 16, 1986, consisting of 21 U.S.-government-funded researchers. Initially, it met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting 3 times a year. Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting, in October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to anyone. The majority of the IETF’s work is done on mailing lists, however, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors.

v  The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings and with the peak attendance in the first 13 meetings of only 120 attendees, at the 12th meeting in January of 1989. It has grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 90s; it had a peak attendance of almost 3000 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring in the early 2000s, and is currently around 1300.

v  During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society.

v  The IETF has at times been ascribed nearly magical abilities by the trade press, who assumed its mechanisms were responsible for the success of the Internet because it works on the Internet’s core protocols. The reality that it is a group of engineers putting together specifications so that multiple vendors’ products can interoperate across networks is considerably more prosaic.

v  The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of draft specifications, review and independent testing by participants, and republication. Interoperability is the chief test for IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly-interlocked systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP IMS).

v  Because it relies on volunteers and uses “rough consensus and running code” as its touchstone, it can, however, be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress or so large as to make consensus difficult. For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change which is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve its speed is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow to emerge.