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 (e.g., ISO/IEC NP 23007) • AWI – Approved new Work Item (e.g., ISO/IEC AWI 15444-14) • WD – Working Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC WD 27032) • CD – Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC CD 23000-5) • FCD – Final Committee Draft (e.g., ISO/IEC FCD 23000-12) • DIS – Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC DIS 14297) • FDIS – Final Draft International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC FDIS 27003) • PRF – Proof of a new International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC PRF 18018) • IS – International Standard (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007) Abbreviations used for amendments are: • TR – Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC TR 19791:2006) • DTR – Draft Technical Report (e.g., ISO/IEC DTR 19791) • TS – Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/TS 16949:2009) • DTS – Draft Technical Specification (e.g., ISO/DTS 11602-1) • PAS – Publicly Available Specification • TTA – Technology Trends Assessment (e.g., ISO/TTA 1:1994) • IWA – International Workshop Agreements (e.g., IWA 1:2005) • Cor – Technical Corrigendum (e.g., ISO/IEC 13818-1:2007/Cor 1:2008) • Guide – a guidance to technical committees for the preparation of standards International Standards are developed by ISO technical committees (TC) and subcommittees (SC) 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 (WG) of experts for the preparation of a working drafts. Subcommittees may have several working groups, which may have several Sub Groups (SG). 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 (DIS) to the ISO member bodies or as a final draft International Standard (FDIS), if the document was developed by an international standardizing body recognized by the ISO Council. Following consideration of any comments and revision of the document, the draft is then approved for submission as a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) 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 (a yes/no final approval ballot), within a period of two months. It is approved as an International Standard (IS) 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. 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 (OOXML, ISO/IEC 29500, approved in April 2008), and another rapid alternative "publicly available specification" (PAS) process had been used by
OASIS to obtain approval of
OpenDocument as an ISO/IEC standard (ISO/IEC 26300, approved in May 2006). As was suggested at the time by Martin Bryan, the outgoing convenor (chairman) of working group 1 (WG1) 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.
International Workshop Agreements International Workshop Agreements (IWAs) are documents that establish a collaboration agreement that allow "key industry players to negotiate in an open workshop environment" outside of ISO in a way that may eventually lead to development of an ISO standard. ==Products named after ISO==