How to Stay Awake in Standards-Body Meetings

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Having recently returned from Committee E12’s ASTM 125^th Anniversary Celebration in Conshohocken, PA, I examined the promotional button that had been given to the attendees. It was plain and unassuming: black-and-white printing of the logo, the occasion, and the catch phrase “helping our world work better.”

 

“Can’t we jazz up this outreach?” I thought. Even our current members find it hard to stay awake in some of our sessions.

 

I am the Vice Chair of Committee E12 (Color and Appearance). Also, I am the Acting Chair. My friend Jack chairs three of E12’s thirteen technical sub-committees. My friend Hugh does intensive work in all the sub-committees. We are all aging out of the ASTM, leaving no successors. A ballot is upon us. No wonder we are thinking about outreach.

 

On behalf of the ISCC News, Jodi Baker recently asked several of us to write a progress report on the activities of E12. As a first exercise, I found out that E12 originated five standards in the past ten years. The standards themselves do not give the impression of a crescendo of purposeful activity: Two of them pertain to retro-reflective materials, one is a statistical algorithm, one is a color-difference formula, and one is a well-used color-order system.

 

Such metrics as the number of standards per decade do not get to the heart of ASTM’s progress, but Jodi’s question surely got to the heart of our outreach problem.

 

 By its nature, standards bodies are difficult to glamorize. A documentary standard represents a consensus between companies to combine their products, say, by company A (making spectrophotometers) buying components from company B (making lamps bought by company A to use in its spectrophotometers). Smooth commerce requires compatible complementary functions. On the other hand, too much collaboration begins to look like a monopoly, which is illegal. A delicate balance must be struck between not enough consensus (e.g., railroad gauges don’t match when they come from opposite sides of a country) and too much consensus (monopoly). In general, a standard does not come close to the bleeding edge of research because research is what distinguishes companies and grows their profits. Research is usually a corporate secret.

 

Because standards are consensus documents and not news reports, standards bodies are slow in their visible production, and color science particularly shows this tendency.

 

Without glamor, how are we to sell standards-body membership to our youthful successors? I think we must see standards bodies as a public work, allowing parts of a product from different companies to be assembled according to a public understanding.  A documentary standard represents an open covenant among companies who declare compliance with the standard.

 

Keeping our standards in order requires vigilance, and that is where younger people can make a substantial contribution. We need our standards to be prescriptive (unambiguous in interpretation), current (not obsolete), and driven into existence by commercial necessity (not by the pride of authorship of a few individuals). Right now, ASTM and its volunteer members are working hard to achieve this vigilance. Users and technical contacts of each standard are continually reporting errors back to the originating technical committee, who then revises the standard to correct the errors. That measure improves the standard’s prescriptiveness. Each standard is reviewed for revision or withdrawal every 5 years. That addresses the concern about obsolescence. Finally, a standard announces no individual authorships (although internally ASTM retains lists of contributors so periodic awards can be made). Anonymity of authorship was intended to reduce the incentive of pride-of-authorship. (That measure is not entirely effective, as Danny Rich humorously noted in an ISCC paper from about 2010.)

 

So, how do you keep awake in a standards-body meeting? Do the necessary job, knowing its general importance, (To fortify my resolve, I have found it helpful to chew on coffee beans.) Also, get into lots of contentious technical discussions at the meetings. I have learned a lot from such discussions at ASTM.

 

I invite you to get involved in ASTM activities (including individual and organizational membership). Please go to https://www.astm.org/get-involved/membership.html.

 

Michael H. Brill