[SystemSafety] FMEA draft international standard

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2014-07-16 19:39 , Braband, Jens wrote:
> But I agree with Peter that there should be some minimal quality requirements and some competence management for standards development.

Engineering-standards development is a society-wide consensus-based process. There is a purpose -
encapsulate the state of the art in <whatever the purpose is of the technology you are describing>.

Let's look at other consensus-based processes. Lawmakers in most European countries and North
America have a review process - the judiciary. The comparison object is a constitution, written or
in the case of the UK unwritten. Not all laws now are locally-made. There are international
agreements, such as the ECHR and EU. These offer comparison also.

Engineering-standards processes, country-internal as well as international, by contrast, have no
such independent review. They are thus vulnerable to capture by powerful special interests, as well
as by the business models of the organisations which implement standardisation procedures. Just as
are governments which have no supervening judicial review processes, as political scientists and
legal scholars have been pointing out for centuries now. I have experienced first-hand both
mechanisms at work in my standards activities.

If some degree of independent review is deemed through centuries of experience to be necessary for
successful democratic lawmaking, how on earth do standards organisations imagine they can get along
without it?

PBL


Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de