International Organization for Standardization

The International Organization for Standardization is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
Membership requirements are given in Article 3 of the ISO Statutes.
ISO was founded on 23 February 1947, and it has published over 25,000 international standards covering almost all aspects of technology and manufacturing. It has over 800 technical committees and subcommittees to take care of standards development.
The organization develops and publishes international standards in technical and nontechnical fields, including everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, transport, IT, agriculture, and healthcare. More specialized topics like electrical and electronic engineering are instead handled by the International Electrotechnical Commission. It is headquartered in Vernier, Switzerland. The three official languages of ISO are English, French, and Russian.

Name and abbreviations

The International Organization for Standardization in French is Organisation internationale de normalisation and in Russian, Международная организация по стандартизации.
A common misconception is that ISO is an abbreviation for "International Standardization Organization" or a similar title in another language. In fact, the letters do not officially represent an acronym or initialism. The organization provides this explanation of the name:

Because 'International Organization for Standardization' would have different acronyms in different languages, our founders decided to give it the short form ISO. ISO is derived from the Greek word . Whatever the country, whatever the language, the short form of our name is always ISO.

During the founding meetings of the new organization, however, the Greek word explanation was not invoked, so this meaning may be a false etymology.
Both the name ISO and the ISO logo are registered trademarks and their use is restricted.

History

The organization that is known today as ISO began in 1926 as the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations, which primarily focused on mechanical engineering. The ISA was suspended in 1942 during World War II but, after the war, the ISA was approached by the recently formed United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee with a proposal to form a new global standards body.
In October 1946, ISA and UNSCC delegates from 25 countries met in London and agreed to join forces to create the International Organization for Standardization. The organization officially began operations on 23 February 1947.
ISO Standards were originally known as ISO Recommendations, e.g., "ISO 1" was issued in 1951 as "ISO/R 1".

Structure and organization

ISO is a voluntary organization whose members are recognized authorities on standards, each one representing one country. Members meet annually at a General Assembly to discuss the strategic objectives of ISO. The organization is coordinated by a central secretariat, based in Vernier, Canton of Geneva.
A council with a rotating membership of 20 member bodies provides guidance and governance, including setting the annual budget of the central secretariat.
The technical management board is responsible for more than 250 technical committees, who develop the ISO standards.

Joint technical committee with IEC

ISO has a joint technical committee with the International Electrotechnical Commission to develop standards relating to information technology. Known as JTC 1 and entitled "Information technology", it was created in 1987 and its mission is "to develop worldwide Information and Communication Technology standards for business and consumer applications."
There was previously also a JTC 2 that was created in 2009 for a joint project to establish common terminology for "standardization in the field of energy efficiency and renewable energy sources". It was later disbanded.

Membership

, there are 173 national members representing ISO in their country, with each country having only one member.
ISO has three membership categories,

Member bodies are national bodies considered the most representative standards body in each country. These are the only members of ISO that have voting rights.
Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization. These members are informed about the work of ISO, but do not participate in standards promulgation.
Subscriber members are countries with small economies. They pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards.

Participating members are called "P" members, as opposed to observing members, who are called "O" members.

Financing

ISO is funded by a combination of:

Organizations that manage the specific projects or loan experts to participate in the technical work
Subscriptions from member bodies, whose subscriptions are in proportion to each country's gross national product and trade figures
Sale of standards
International standards and other publications

International standards are the main products of ISO. It also publishes technical reports, technical specifications, publicly available specifications, technical corrigenda, and guides.
International standards
Technical reports
For example:

ISO/IEC TR 17799:2000 Code of Practice for Information Security Management
ISO/TR 19033:2000 Technical product documentation – Metadata for construction documentation

Technical and publicly available specifications
For example:

ISO/TS 16952-1:2006 Technical product documentation – Reference designation system – Part 1: General application rules
ISO/PAS 11154:2006 Road vehicles – Roof load carriers

Technical corrigenda
ISO guides
For example:

ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004 Standardization and related activities – General vocabulary
ISO/IEC Guide 65:1996 General requirements for bodies operating product certification.
Document copyright

ISO documents have strict copyright restrictions and ISO charges for most copies., the typical cost of a copy of an ISO standard is about or more. Some standards by ISO and its official U.S. representative are made freely available.

Standardization process

A standard published by ISO/IEC is the last stage of a long process that commonly starts with the proposal of new work within a committee. Some abbreviations used for marking a standard with its status are:

PWI – Preliminary Work Item
NP or NWIP – New Proposal / New Work Item Proposal
AWI – Approved new Work Item
WD – Working Draft
CD – Committee Draft
FCD – Final Committee Draft
DIS – Draft International Standard
FDIS – Final Draft International Standard
PRF – Proof of a new International Standard
IS – International Standard

Abbreviations used for amendments are:

NP Amd – New Proposal Amendment
AWI Amd – Approved new Work Item Amendment
WD Amd – Working Draft Amendment
CD Amd / PDAmd – Committee Draft Amendment / Proposed Draft Amendment
FPDAmd / DAM – Final Proposed Draft Amendment / Draft Amendment
FDAM – Final Draft Amendment
PRF Amd –
Amd – Amendment

Other abbreviations are:

TR – Technical Report
DTR – Draft Technical Report
TS – Technical Specification
DTS – Draft Technical Specification
PAS – Publicly Available Specification
TTA – Technology Trends Assessment
IWA – International Workshop Agreements
Cor – Technical Corrigendum
Guide – a guidance to technical committees for the preparation of standards

International Standards are developed by ISO technical committees and subcommittees by a process with six steps:

Stage 1: Proposal stage
Stage 2: Preparatory stage
Stage 3: Committee stage
Stage 4: Enquiry stage
Stage 5: Approval stage
Stage 6: Publication stage

The TC/SC may set up working groups of experts for the preparation of a working drafts. Subcommittees may have several working groups, which may have several Sub Groups.

Stage code	Stage	Associated document name	Abbreviations
00	Preliminary	Preliminary work item	PWI
10	Proposal	New work item proposal
20	Preparatory	Working draft or drafts
30	Committee	Committee draft or drafts
40	Enquiry	Enquiry draft
50	Approval	Final draft
60	Publication	International Standard
90	Review
95	Withdrawal

It is possible to omit certain stages, if there is a document with a certain degree of maturity at the start of a standardization project, for example, a standard developed by another organization. ISO/IEC directives also allow the so-called "Fast-track procedure". In this procedure, a document is submitted directly for approval as a draft International Standard to the ISO member bodies or as a final draft International Standard, if the document was developed by an international standardizing body recognized by the ISO Council.
The first step, a proposal of work, is approved at the relevant subcommittee or technical committee. A working group of experts is typically set up by the subcommittee for the preparation of a working draft. When the scope of a new work is sufficiently clarified, some of the working groups may make an open request for proposals—known as a "call for proposals". The first document that is produced, for example, for audio and video coding standards is called a verification model . When a sufficient confidence in the stability of the standard under development is reached, a working draft is produced. This is in the form of a standard, but is kept internal to working group for revision. When a working draft is sufficiently mature and the subcommittee is satisfied that it has developed an appropriate technical document for the problem being addressed, it becomes a committee draft and is sent to the P-member national bodies of the SC for the collection of formal comments. Revisions may be made in response to the comments, and successive committee drafts may be produced and circulated until consensus is reached to proceed to the next stage, called the "enquiry stage".
After a consensus to proceed is established, the subcommittee will produce a draft international standard, and the text is submitted to national bodies for voting and comment within a period of five months. A document in the DIS stage is available to the public for purchase and may be referred to with its ISO DIS reference number.
Following consideration of any comments and revision of the document, the draft is then approved for submission as a Final Draft International Standard if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC are in favour and if not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. ISO will then hold a ballot among the national bodies where no technical changes are allowed, within a period of two months. It is approved as an International Standard if a two-thirds majority of the P-members of the TC/SC is in favour and not more than one-quarter of the total number of votes cast are negative. After approval, the document is published by the ISO central secretariat, with only minor editorial changes introduced in the publication process before the publication as an International Standard.
Except for a relatively small number of standards, ISO standards are not available free of charge, but rather for a purchase fee, which has been seen by some as unaffordable for small open-source projects.
The process of developing standards within ISO was criticized around 2007 as being too difficult for timely completion of large and complex standards, and some members were failing to respond to ballots, causing problems in completing the necessary steps within the prescribed time limits. In some cases, alternative processes have been used to develop standards outside of ISO and then submit them for its approval. A more rapid "fast-track" approval procedure was used in ISO/IEC JTC 1 for the standardization of Office Open XML, and another rapid alternative "publicly available specification" process had been used by OASIS to obtain approval of OpenDocument as an ISO/IEC standard.
As was suggested at the time by Martin Bryan, the outgoing convenor of working group 1 of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, the rules of ISO were eventually tightened so that participating members that fail to respond to votes are demoted to observer status.
The computer security entrepreneur and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, was quoted in a ZDNet blog article in 2008 about the process of standardization of OOXML as saying: "I think it de-values the confidence people have in the standards setting process", and alleged that ISO did not carry out its responsibility. He also said that Microsoft had intensely lobbied many countries that traditionally had not participated in ISO and stacked technical committees with Microsoft employees, solution providers, and resellers sympathetic to Office Open XML:

When you have a process built on trust and when that trust is abused, ISO should halt the process... ISO is an engineering old boys club and these things are boring so you have to have a lot of passion ... then suddenly you have an investment of a lot of money and lobbying and you get artificial results. The process is not set up to deal with intensive corporate lobbying and so you end up with something being a standard that is not clear.