Talk:International Organization for Standardization
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ISO and Copyrights
What's the copyright status of the standard documents? They are for sale in the ISO website Davidme 03:29 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)
[1] (http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/xsite/copyright.html): The material on ISO Online is subject to the same conditions of copyright as ISO publications, and its use is subject to the user's acceptance of ISO's conditions of copyright for ISO publications, as set out below. Any use of the material, including reproduction in whole or in part to another Internet site, requires permission in writing from ISO.
[2] (http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/index.html) The short country names from ISO 3166-1 and the alpha-2 codes are made available by ISO at no charge for internal use and non-commercial purposes. The use of ISO 3166-1 in commercial products may be subject to a licence fee.
Is this GFDL-compatible? Davidme
- No, the ISO standards are public, in that they are published, and you can use them to claim conformance. But while the standards documents are available for purchase, they are pretty expensive. You can get a license from ISO to reprint or include a standard in another publication, but the license is also expensive, and their terms for any on-line use are so prohibitve that almost no online versions exist. Lou I
While ISO standards are copywrited, most published final standards are the result of draft versions submitted or updated by members. The U.S. government's standards body NIST maintains that since these were frequently created with public funds, the draft version is public domain. Lou I 19:48, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Discussion before Article Update
The ISO (IMHO) is not an non-governmental organization. I expect to update the article in September to reflect that opinion, but have placed this note and will allow at least two weeks for comments. Lou I 19:48, 31 Aug 2003 (UTC)
On the ISO website (here) (http://www.iso.org/iso/en/aboutiso/introduction/index.html) I found this statement:
- ISO is a non-governmental organization: its members are not, as is the case in the United Nations system, delegations of national governments. Nevertheless, ISO occupies a special position between the public and private sectors. This is because, on the one hand, many of its member institutes are part of the governmental structure of their countries, or are mandated by their government. On the other hand, other members have their roots uniquely in the private sector, having been set up by national partnerships of industry associations.
-- Heron
Heron and I have pretty well agreed to include something like the following statement: "While the ISO defines itself as an NGO, its ability to set standards which often become law makes it more powerful than most NGOs, and in practice it acts as a consortium with strong links to governments and major corporations." Lou I 18:56, 1 Sep 2003 (UTC)
History and 4 number label: I was hoping to get a brief history which explains its special and powerful role, its origins, growth and key moments of emergence of power, and presumably of replacing other organisations (IEC is still powerful in the electrotechnical field). I was also concerned that the second last paragraph describes the "ISO 99999:yyyy:title" label format standard, and the very next para. labels a standard as ISO 9660 Garry
About that format... That was confusing. Neither of the two examples given adheres strictly to the format, which seems pretty embarrassing. Can somebody who knows what he's doing correct that in whatever way it needs to be corrected? -- Anon
Disambiguation with ISO Rating
Okay, this one's probably been done to death, and if it has feel free to point me to the discussion (assuming it's archived somewhere). BUT... has it been decided by consensus somewhere that the ISO page should be a redirect here and not a disambiguation page that also points to ISO rating? I understand that ISO rating is an American standard and all, but right now if I search Wikipedia for ISO -all- I get is pointers to this page. ISO rating gets swallowed up and is pretty much unfindable. --Bcordes 17:21, Jun 30, 2004 (UTC)
- Replying to my own comment, ISO rating got redirected to Film speed, which is turns out is an ISO standard. So, I added an entry for ISO 5800 on List of ISO Standards and added a redirect at ISO 5800 to Film speed. Searching for "ISO film" gives you a link to ANSI, which gets you to the right place. So I'm happy now. :) --Bcordes 21:51, Jul 25, 2004 (UTC)
Connection back to IEC
I'm fairly new to Wiki, so I won't be surprised if I've missed this. Essentially, there is a very large group known as ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, that exists to handle the overlap in responsibilities for International Standardization between ISO and IEC. It consists of a number of sub-committees which are subsequently divided into working groups. I think there should be some type of entry for ISO/IEC JTC1, but I'm at a loss at how to apporach this. Should it be a stand-alone article or is there a way to link the ISO and IEC article together and capture the material?
I did find a single entry that referenced JTC1, but there was no link, not even a link to a non-existent article. Colin 23:22, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- I suggest that you create a new section in this article titled == ISO/IEC JTC1 ==, explaining what it is and linking to IEC. You can add a similar section to the IEC article, linking to ISO. If somebody later decides to make this a separate article, then that's easily done, but the most important thing is to get the information out of your head and in to Wikipedia. Hope this helps. --Heron 16:11, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Thanks Heron. I've done that, hopefully what I've added makes sense. Continuing with my attempts to get a handle on the whole Wikipedia concept, I noticed that there was an abbreviated list of national bodies that contribute to IEC listed on that page. Obviously there is also a similar list for ISO. I would guess, though, that such a list would do better as its own article, "National Standards Organizations" or similar. Sort of like the link to a list of International Standards on this page (I haven't followed it yet to see what's there). Thoughts?
I really don't want to become known as "Mr Standards", I know the perfect individual for that title and I will never be as knowledgeable nor anal about standards as he is. I will, however, contribute as I can.
- Nice work, Colin. You'll find a long list of NSOs at Standards organization, so you won't have to type them all in. --Heron 15:11, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)
W3C is open source, right?
"...businesses started creating private consortia like W3C...". Huh? If I'm not mistaken, W3C is a non-profit open source organisation and certainly not privately owned. And I even believe that it already existed before private companies started to take part in it (because they realised that they could never surpass it through individual efforts). Though I'm not sure about that last bit. I'm in the middle of another edit so I don't have the time to research this now.
DirkvdM 08:43, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)
- It's private in the sense that it's not government-affiliated the way ISO is (as opposed to private in the sense that it's not traded on the stock market). Although it's non-profit and it's hosted by three universities, W3C is a pay-to-play organization. No individual members are allowed; you have to be a big organization that can pay a big chunk of cash up front, and then you have to subsidize the salary of several staff members whom you send to W3C (and they now become W3C's researchers, not yours). That's why most of the W3C members are large private corporations, since it's so expensive to subsidize W3C work. Furthermore, Tim Berners-Lee is the benevolent dictator who has the final say.
- ISO is "public" in that it's an international quasi-governmental institution affiliated with the U.N., it's allegedly a "democracy" of standards institutions where each country can vote. To be part of it (that is, as an individual), you have to be credentialed by your country's "official" standards organization. In most cases the "official" organization is a government agency, with the exception of the U.S., where our official government standards agency is actually NIST but ANSI (a private organization) is the ISO representative because it has better lobbyists.
- I put "public" in quotes, since most people don't have the government connections (or the time, money, or energy) to get credentialed so they can go participate in ISO's ridiculously inefficient meetings (try reading ISO Bulletin sometime to see what I mean). But the general idea behind ISO (at least as those clowns see it) is that if each government standards agency is careful to represent the "will" of that government's constituents, then hopefully the eventual ISO consensus on a standard will represent a delicate global consensus of consumers and businesses of all sizes (as opposed to the views of Microsoft and Adobe and any other giant corporation joining this week's consortium).
- In contrast, the IETF approach is to let anyone join who wants to volunteer, although as Berners-Lee discovered, the IETF approach also has its problems. --Coolcaesar 09:21, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
- Ok, got that. But still, the text seems misleading to me. So I did a little research this time and adapted the text. Alas, the only way I could do that was to really alter it, something I don't usually like to do - I prefer to leave the text intact and add a clarification. I hope I haven't stepped on any toes :). Oh, and I've found that the W3C isn't Open Source, but Open Software, which isn't the same but comes close. DirkvdM 11:00, 2005 Apr 21 (UTC)