[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Derek M Jones]

Peter,

Why are you bothering the people on this list about a German problem
with German standards?

> This week at a meeting of the German National Committee responsible for functional safety of E/E/PE
> systems (and therefore IEC 61508 matters), the chair of a Working Group complained about the
> unavailability of standards for standards-committee work. The German electrotechnical standards
> organisation DKE makes all German standards available to all standards committees, but German
> standards are often translations into German of ISO or IEC standards, and inadequate for work with
> international import, for which one needs the ISO or IEC originals.
...
> Germany could do similarly. First, accept English as an appropriate language for German standards,

http://shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com/2016/04/28/explaining-the-decline-of-german-comments-in-libreoffice/

> through a change in the law. But then a couple of publishing houses would have their business model
> trashed, and "jobs would be lost", which is a discussion-ending comment here. (The usual response,
> that everyone would be better off by paying the same people the same money to do nothing, has little
> or no traction here.)

For those of you interested in obtaining copies of 'Indian' standards...
https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/

>
> There might be something to this. There were lots of people in the room, and use of the word
> "absurd" was not challenged. Maybe this could be taken to the DKE CEOs and thereby on to the IEC?
> The IEC is pretty intransigent about its business model. But the issue would be on the table, and
> that is a prelude to any movement on it.
>
> There is considerable disagreement with parts of the IEC business model. Companies and people
> provide their work on standards for free; the IEC makes money off it, and there is no quid pro quo
> arrangement at all. *Everybody* brings this up. An engineer costs hisher company let's say €400 a
> day, so even a moderately passive committee member will cost hisher company €4,000 a year; say
> €12,000 for work on a document for three years. For travel costs, add some 50% on top of that (at
> those prices, you wonder when decent videoconferencing is going to become generally available?). And
> an active member costs ten times that much or even more (travel costs remain similar, though).
>
> PBL
>
> Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
> Je suis Charlie
> Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de
>
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-- 
Derek M. Jones           Software analysis
tel: +44 (0)1252 520667  blog:shape-of-code.coding-guidelines.com