In the previous newsletter the various steps that a standard to be developed goes through were discussed and ended with the creation of a CD.
This is the first elaborated result of the working group that had the task of drawing up a new standard and is therefore called Committee Draft. This “draft” document goes to the secretariat of the Technical Committee concerned. This is TC101 for “Electrostatics”. Here it is checked whether the IEC conditions are met and is forwarded to the IEC central office. Here the draft document is processed in the IEC systems and visible for comments and additions. This is the moment at which the worldwide affiliated National Committees (NCs) have their input on a new standard in development. This input is done in a standardized way, see figure 1 as an example.
The secretariat collects this input within a pre-agreed time and forwards it to the responsible working group. The working group assesses the comments and fills in the last column “observations secretariat”. After circulation of the observations, the processing follows in the original document (CD). If there are many changes, the document with implemented changes is circulated again and the whole cycle repeats itself and a CD2, CD3… appears.
Ultimately, a document is created on which worldwide consensus has been reached, the so-called Final Draft International Standard. After which publication follows.
The entire process from nothing to a globally accepted standard can take several years depending on the number of comments submitted and the complexity of the topic.
The next section discusses how to deal with these documents/standards.
(By Bas Grootemaat Kingsize Consultancy)
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