• ISO
• IEC
• JTC1
• SC7
• WG2

Structure: Where does Project 11 fit?

Phil Cohen

ISO is the International Organisation for Standardization, the same organisation that published ISO9001, the quality management standard.  All ISO standards are developed by expert volunteers from multiple countries, and altered and approved by a process where each member country gets one vote.  IEC is the International Electrotechnical Commission, a worldwide organisation which develops standards for electronics.

Some years ago, ISO and IEC formed an organisation called ISO/IEC JTC1, (Joint Technical Committee 1), to develop IT standards.  JTC1 uses a standards development and approval process which is a slightly modified version of the ISO process.

There are already dozens of JTC1 standards, and more are being published every month.  Hundreds of volunteer experts around the world are working within JTC1, which is organised into sub-committees.  Sub-committee 7 (SC 7) looks after software engineering standards.  SC 7 meets once a year at a ‘Plenary’ (generally in May), where all of the hundred or so people actively involved in SC7 meet to coordinate (and argue about!) the content of ISO/IEC software engineering standards.

Within SC 7 are about a dozen ‘working groups’, each looking after one aspect of software engineering standards.  Working group 2 (WG2) looks after documentation: both user documentation and software lifecycle documentation.

WG2 meets twice a year, once at the SC 7 plenary, and once (an ‘interim’ meeting) each September or October.  The next WG2 interim meeting is in New Zealand in September 05, and the one after that will be at the will be at the SC 7 plenary in Thailand in May 06.

The full technical title of WG2 is “ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 7 WG2”.

WG2 generally has around six or eight people at its meetings, each representing one of the ISO member countries.  At the last meeting we had representatives from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan.  Each of these people is a volunteer expert in the area of software engineering documentation.  Technically, ISO is an association of national standards bodies, so the nominations to WG2 came from the national standards body in each country.  So for example, I (Phil Cohen) was nominated by Standards Australia to represent Australia on WG2.  Other WG2 members were nominated by the British Standards Institution, Standards Council of Canada, and so on.  These standards bodies are known in the ISO sphere as ‘National Bodies’ (NBs - click here for a list), and they are the entities that actually vote for the adoption or modification of a standard.

The standards development process is a long and complex one, starting with a proposal (a ‘new work item proposal’, or NP) to develop a new standard.  After the proposal has been approved (by a postal vote to the NBs), a working draft (WD) is developed, then adopted by another postal vote as a committee draft (CD), then goes through various voting and modification cycles until it finally appears (if successful!) as an ISO/IEC standard.  The whole process can take up to five years, mainly due to the delays imposed by the voting process.

After an NP has been approved, a Project Editor will be appointed, generally from the people already on the working group.  The Project Editor is responsible for the development of the text of the standard, and for shepherding it through the long publication process.  I was Project Editor for ISO/IEC standard IS15910 which sets out the user documentation process, and which started life as an Australian Standard (AS4258).  I have been involved as a volunteer in standards development for more than ten years.  My day job is running HCi, a Sydney technical writers agency and consultancy.  I get some travel funding from Standards Australia (about 30% of the actual cost) and don’t get paid for my time.  Why do I do it?  Because it needs to be done.

Project 11

Before I explain what Project 11 is, let me give you a bit of background about where standards come from.  Most standards start as an idea in the head of one individual.  In theory standards are developed by NBs, but in practice of course, it’s the individual experts who actually do the work, decide on their country’s vote, and so on.  For this to work effectively, each expert has to have good connections with his or her industry (in this case, the technical communications industry), and represent their views.  But at the end of the day, standards come from individuals.

Many ISO standards begin life as national standards … the Australian Standard I mentioned earlier (AS4258) is a case in point.  This started as an idea in the early ‘90s, based on my involvement in the NSW Society for Technical Communication (I was President of that body for three years, committee member for ten).  I approached Standards Australia, which helped set up a committee of Australian experts, and together we wrote AS4258.  It took five years.

Then I got involved in ISO (specifically, SC 7), and proposed a new standard based on AS4258 … this eventually became IS15910.

I mention all of this to show that standards are not (generally) developed to some master plan.  No-one sits down at a JTC1, or a SC 7 level and says “Well, what set of standards does the world need?”.  Generally, even where whole suites of standards are developed, the idea came originally from one individual.  That’s not to say that an individual can decide the content of a standard: by the time the voting system gets finished with it, a standard will be the agreed common understanding of some hundreds, or even thousands, of experts across the planet.  

But the original idea still comes from one person.  That’s not necessarily a good thing.

The problem is that each working group (and WG2 is no exception) ends up with a fairly random collection of standards, each standing on its own, often overlapping (and sometimes contradicting!) each other.

WG2 publishes documentation standards, one of which is IS18019 - another standard which, like IS15910, covers the process of designing and developing user documentation.  IS18019 and IS15910 specify the use of a methodology called ‘audience and task analysis’ (similar to learning needs analysis) to determine what the content of a given document or suite should be.  Within WG2 we made the brave decision to replace all of the dozen or so standards we have published with one coherent set, whose design was carried out by WG2 using audience and task analysis.

We’ve done the broad planning now, and have a roadmap for the eight standards we hope to publish.  Here it is:

(Bold added for clarification, not part of the actual document number).

When we developed the Australian Standard, I asked a number of people to work in a committee, and we each took sections of the standard and worked on them, submitting the finished sections for review by the other committee members.  We also put the standard out for review to the broader technical documentation community, and got dozens of excellent suggestions and corrections back via that process.

Project 11 is about repeating that inclusive development process, but with an international community.