Section 3. The PAS process

International Standards. These documents describe the roles of the PAS originator and the PAS itself and are intended to increase formal standardization process activities. As noted earlier , because of the drop in membership and active projects, members of the JTC1 felt left out of mainstream IT standardization: JTC1 formal standards lagged behind the growth of the Internet, the rising importance of the IETF, and the appearance of the Web (and W3C to standardize it). The PAS process was an attempt to remedy that situation. his document contains eight sections and two annexes. The main text is less than 3,000 words long, and represents the best effort of JTC1 participants and rule writers to chart a course in an unfamiliar sea. Although I cannot claim with complete certainty that members of consortia were asked about the PAS process before it was initiated, I feel that this was an effort initiated by JTC1 in partial isolation. The document is interesting for what it says and what it omits. I review the content and implications of each section as individual statements as well as part of the document as a whole. Much of what follows is an examination of phrases used by the document makers as well as a review of these statements as a nonstandardization participant might interpret them. Again, the context and the content, not just the content, is what is important in this document. Because the document is copyrighted by ISO, I have not reproduced it here. However, it is available for viewing at the url: www.iso.ch.