Who were the people involved? With what (public) backgrounds? How were
they "selected"?
It gets complicated.
There are two committees, sort of. There's the US ANSI committee, and there's
the ISO committee, but it's more convenient if they have the same meetings,
so they do. The ANSI committee has membership based on paying dues and
choosing to go. Other national bodies have different ways of picking people.
Many technical decisions are decided by "straw poll", where all people
present, whether or not voting, are polled to determine the sense of the
group. Decisions that actually need to be formally made are made by a vote
of national bodies, only officially it's "consensus" of national bodies.
The voting rules for ANSI are that you have to declare intent to be a voting
member, and at any given meeting, you have to have attended two of the last
three meetings (including the current one) to vote. So if you attend every
other meeting, you can vote at the ones you're at.
Were there non-voting members? What did the right to vote depend on?
Choosing to opt for it and attending meetings. Schildt didn't opt for
a voting membership, if I recall correctly, but more significantly, he
never showed up for meetings. I actually made a bit over half the meetings
during the first 9 years or so of my membership.
Were committee meetings anything like corporate dev team meetings? (I
ask this in a completely neutral tone.)
I have no idea. I am reliably assured that $dayjob's work enviroment
is wildly atypical (in a good way).
Committee meetings were, for the large part, pretty fun. Mostly polite,
reasonable, and fairly friendly. I can recall about one instance of real
hostility, involving internal politics in a national delegation. So far
as I know, the right people won that one, although it happened right as
I was dropping out for budget reasons, so I'm not totally sure.
There were various different activities, which were resolved in different
ways. Defect processing worked by splitting into smaller groups to look
at a series of defects and come up with proposed answers, which were then
presented to the committee. People presented things like proposals for
extensions, proposals for alignment with other standards, and so on.
Generally, by the end of the week, decision making had declined in quality,
so there was an effort to schedule hard stuff early and stuff that was less
important late in the week.
I'm not trying to provoke hostility, I'm just curious how it all went.
The rationales sometimes use language that "tells a story", like "the
committee considerd this or that", or "the standard developers came to
the conclusion that so and so", but I'd like to know more.
My views are probably only semi-informed, as a great deal of the material
is social and I tend to miss a big hunk of social face-to-face stuff.
-s
