[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Les Chambers]

Peter
A quick fact check.
I looked up IEC 61508 on the IEC Web store and found:
IEC 61508:2010 CMV  Commented version, Price:  CHF 3169.00 (AUD 4436).

This puts it out of the reach of most private individuals, especially students.
I was wondering if the IEC has any plan to donate copies to universities or place copies in libraries. A search of the British library online does not turn up a copy.

The reason I ask is that I had a visit from a third-year software engineering student this week. She was looking for intern work. She had never heard of 61508 or the concept of functional safety.

Some measures clearly need to be taken to put functional safety concepts in the hands (and minds) of the next generation of software engineers.

Is anything afoot?

Cheers
Les

-----Original Message-----
From: systemsafety [mailto:systemsafety-bounces at lists.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de] On Behalf Of Peter Bernard Ladkin
Sent: Saturday, May 7, 2016 4:42 PM
To: The System Safety List
Subject: [SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

John Knight, Martyn Thomas, I, and others here, have occupied ourselves sporadically by commenting on the inefficacy of current arrangements for engineering standardisation. For example,
http://scsc.org.uk/paper_126/protect_reg_01-Knight.pdf?pap=933 and http://www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de/publications/WhitePapers/RVSsfssPrinciples.pdf

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.

The official position is that each standards-committee member must buy hisher own copy of a standards document which is needed. There is no discretion; the IEC (or ISO) holds copyright and makes the document available for purchase, and German copyright law is pretty rigid.

This situation is appropriately characterised as "absurd" (there was general agreement).

Some standards organisations, and some Secretaries of committees in them (who are standards-organisation employees) make discretely available to those committee members with a need the FDIS of a standard, which may differ in only minor ways from the published standard. The FDIS will be prominently watermarked "only to be used for standards development purposes". I don't know the status of such practice. The CDVs and FDIS are made available by international agreement to all standards workers and indeed competent engineers at development time, as part of the process of eliciting comments, but I don't know what governs their use, if anything at all, after the standard is published.

The Brits apparently have no problem. The BSI makes available British Standards for its committees to work with, and these differ in only formal ways from the international standards where there are such, but apparently sufficiently to render inoperative the IEC copyright.

Germany could do similarly. First, accept English as an appropriate language for German standards, 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.)

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