9 ms·

What bugs me is so much of our (Australia's) government's policies over time have increasingly deferred to some ISO standard or another. These days most agencie

by parksy 5y ago

What bugs me is so much of our (Australia's) government's policies over time have increasingly deferred to some ISO standard or another. These days most agencies / departments are stipulating some form of ISO27k compliance from vendors, a standard that can only be purchased from ISO. Given we pay our taxes to the government, and I would have thought defining policy standards was one of the services we pay tax to have (what better thing for governments to do than what they're naturally geared towards - bureaucracy?), at the very least they would be able to directly and in detail outline the standards they expect and not simply handball the entire definition and auditing off to an international organisation and myriad consultancies with the stroke of a single bullet point requirement in the RFx. The quagmire of ISO consultancies are often charging exorbitant rates to deliver essentially a set of Excel templates, when the hard work of adopting a standard really is all in-house and any company with a copy of the standards and the templates can pretty much get it all done internally then get certified. And ultimately when it comes down to it, the standard doesn't really do much to improve quality outcomes, especially for an organisation that doesn't give a fig. A well intentioned company that's on the ball will already be following best practices, a shady company that plays cowboy will do the bare minimum to get the badge. Anyway, just an axe I tend to grind. Standards definitely are needed and have their place but holy hell is it a mess ATM. There needs to be an independent open source standards body, ISO is a farce IMHO - the standards as they are written are actually decent but their business model and hands-off approach to auditing and verifying standard adherence is a big issue across multiple sectors I think.

webmaven 5y ago
> a shady company that plays cowboy will do the bare minimum to get the badge. Isn't that part of the point of having a standard? That the bare minimum done by shady companies is actually enough to prevent adverse outcomes?
roenxi 5y ago
Dim memory suggests that Standards Australia [0] is required by numerous pieces of legislation. SA is not only privately owned, but I believe bought out by Chinese interests. Not that I mind the Chinese part, but it just adds a delicious surrealness to the situation. I suppose it is better that they control the standards rather than the clowns in government who can't even manage standards. [0] https://www.standards.org.au/ https://www.standards.org.au/
- ajdlinux 5y ago
  Standards Australia continues to exist as a non-profit industry association - you're thinking of SAI Global, which was SA's for-profit services wing that got sold off.
necovek 5y ago
The worst is that the fees only cover the cost of running ISO the-organization: standard writers are not compensated by ISO for the work they put in. My trick is to, for technical stuff, look for working groups and their mailing lists or other collaborative spaces, which are sometimes in the public, and get the latest working draft that they put out before it was turned into an official standard. That's how I learned C in-depth in my high school days from the C9X (became C99 :)) draft standard. Edit: clarify that ISO is not paying for the work being done on the standard, instead of that "writers usually do all the work for free".
- dagw 5y ago
  standard writers usually do all the work for free. My dad worked on a couple of standards, and while he wasn't paid by the standards body he didn't work for free. He was employed at a company and the company paid him his salary. Working on those standards was just another part of his day job.
  - teddyh 5y ago
    Your dad also did not own the work he performed, the company he worked for owned it. It was that company which chose to donate the work (which your dad did) to the standards body. If I donate food to a food bank, would it be fair for someone else to say “That food wasn’t donated for free! A store got paid for that food!” No, of course not. See also: https://satwcomic.com/every-time https://satwcomic.com/every-time
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - kbsspl 5y ago
      makes one think why those companies are paying for something to be a standard.
      - remram 5y ago
        Having your own data model/format/protocol become the standard makes it a lot cheaper for you to support the standard later. Everyone else has to support your stuff.
throw0101a 5y ago
Meta: If anyone wants to know the history of ISO, its predecessors, and the history of writing public standards, see Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 by Craig Murphy and JoAnne Yates (ISBN 9781421440033): > Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. > This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. * https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules Edit: Presentation from one of the co-authors: > Craig Murphy, Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science, gives a book talk with insights into the realm of global standard setting that has shaped global industries such as technology, trade, construction and the environment. He reveals the ways in which the committees of global stakeholders, which include manufacturers, users, and unaffiliated engineers collaborated to develop these standards of compliance, and the impact of these standards on human livelihoods worldwide. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8
3pt14159 5y ago
I mean, I was ideologically outraged as a young adult when I found out that the Ontario building code must be followed by law but that it must be purchased for around $350 at the time. But I kinda get it now. Doing stuff the right way is hard. It takes big, sorta expensive books. It's not the end of the world.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  Establishing laws the right way may be hard, but following them is compulsory. I don't see why being forced to pay in order not to break the law shouldn't be an outrage.
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Yeah that's how I used to think too, but we can characterize it another way if we want to. The costs of upkeeping the codes that keep us safe should be born by those that test their limits. But in the end, to me it is much simpler than that: This is a minor annoyance at worst. Imagine losing a family member due to ignorance or recklessness of others. Or prolonged, acute illness due to a misdiagnoses and subsequent medication complication. An engagement ending without notice because you answered a question innocently and honestly and it caused them to re-think the whole thing. These are real problems. When life is rosy cosy a three inch thick book costing $350 may seem like an outrage, but it really isn't.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      I guess another way to look at this is just another tax that you have to pay. This tactic is underhanded though in that it favors those who don't pay the tax and take risks without knowing the code (they have more money left if they win the gamble). EDIT: plus, a "buy this law" tax is regressive: those who do the least work subject to this tax will bear the highest tax/unit of work costs. E.g. a private person remodelling their house will pay the same 300$ as the huge construction company. It also creates a hurdle for new entrants, who don't have any existing connections from whom they could borrow the book. When it comes to financing the research on law, there are ways that have better properties than those above (like a tax on work done).
loudmax 5y ago
> deliver essentially a set of Excel templates Ironically, Excel itself being another proprietary standard that's accepted as a necessity.
- groone 5y ago
  Open alternative standard. Also pretty good interoperability with Excel itself. http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.html http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.htm...
jackvalentine 5y ago
The thing that drives me nuts in my day to day work is that the two ways you can get standards in Australia now require you to install an insane DRM plugin - it's worse than a regular 'protected' PDFs. And I say this as a SA contributor.
zohch 5y ago
Australia seems to be trying to outdo UK with absurd dystopinism.
- deathhand 5y ago
  Off topic but I think this happens when the stratification of society becomes very stagnant. The calcification creates pipelines of protectionalist thoughts that manifest in ego driven total surveillance or lobbying that protects industries furthering the calcification.
pfortuny 5y ago
It is not ISO then, it is the specific agency which makes them compulsory the one who should hand out the (allegedly much) money to ISO and make the documents available to those who must comply with the specific standard. But I agree that making some proprietary standard compulsory goes against any fair law, if there is no way to obtain that information easily from the Government.
colanderman 5y ago
I want to give a shout-out to the Indian government and whichever activists and legislators were responsible for the Right To Information laws. I was looking for IEC 60958 (the S/PDIF standard -- granted, not ISO but still proprietary) and found it available free on the Internet thanks to those laws, and presumably having been referenced in some other Indian law. The cover page [1] even includes affirmations of the right to knowledge. I wish other democracies could pull this off too. [1] https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S04/is.iec.60958.3.2003.pdf https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S04/is.iec.60958.3.2003....
ajdlinux 5y ago
The ACT Legislative Assembly's Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety has repeatedly raised the issue of access to standards, as have other state parliaments like WA. Little has been done about it, even though they're asking for something as minimal as providing access to standards via public libraries. Apparently there was a COAG working group looking at the problem but they've seemingly achieved little, and they're not even aiming very high to begin with. https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1609068/Access-to-Australian-Standards-adopted-in-legislationCorrespondencePaper.pdf https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/000...
atoav 5y ago
It is a standard. If it is not publically readable it should not be allowed to call itself a standard. I am for legislation that defines standards as such. If you want a standard to be applied within the jurisdiction the first bar should be that it is publically readable.

by parksy 5y ago

webmaven 5y ago

> a shady company that plays cowboy will do the bare minimum to get the badge. Isn't that part of the point of having a standard? That the bare minimum done by shady companies is actually enough to prevent adverse outcomes?

roenxi 5y ago

Dim memory suggests that Standards Australia [0] is required by numerous pieces of legislation. SA is not only privately owned, but I believe bought out by Chinese interests. Not that I mind the Chinese part, but it just adds a delicious surrealness to the situation. I suppose it is better that they control the standards rather than the clowns in government who can't even manage standards. [0] https://www.standards.org.au/ https://www.standards.org.au/

ajdlinux 5y ago
Standards Australia continues to exist as a non-profit industry association - you're thinking of SAI Global, which was SA's for-profit services wing that got sold off.

necovek 5y ago

The worst is that the fees only cover the cost of running ISO the-organization: standard writers are not compensated by ISO for the work they put in. My trick is to, for technical stuff, look for working groups and their mailing lists or other collaborative spaces, which are sometimes in the public, and get the latest working draft that they put out before it was turned into an official standard. That's how I learned C in-depth in my high school days from the C9X (became C99 :)) draft standard. Edit: clarify that ISO is not paying for the work being done on the standard, instead of that "writers usually do all the work for free".

dagw 5y ago
standard writers usually do all the work for free. My dad worked on a couple of standards, and while he wasn't paid by the standards body he didn't work for free. He was employed at a company and the company paid him his salary. Working on those standards was just another part of his day job.
- teddyh 5y ago
  Your dad also did not own the work he performed, the company he worked for owned it. It was that company which chose to donate the work (which your dad did) to the standards body. If I donate food to a food bank, would it be fair for someone else to say “That food wasn’t donated for free! A store got paid for that food!” No, of course not. See also: https://satwcomic.com/every-time https://satwcomic.com/every-time
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - kbsspl 5y ago
    makes one think why those companies are paying for something to be a standard.
    - remram 5y ago
      Having your own data model/format/protocol become the standard makes it a lot cheaper for you to support the standard later. Everyone else has to support your stuff.

throw0101a 5y ago

Meta: If anyone wants to know the history of ISO, its predecessors, and the history of writing public standards, see Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting Since 1880 by Craig Murphy and JoAnne Yates (ISBN 9781421440033): > Private, voluntary standards shape almost everything we use, from screw threads to shipping containers to e-readers. They have been critical to every major change in the world economy for more than a century, including the rise of global manufacturing and the ubiquity of the internet. In Engineering Rules, JoAnne Yates and Craig N. Murphy trace the standard-setting system's evolution through time, revealing a process with an astonishingly pervasive, if rarely noticed, impact on all of our lives. > This type of standard setting was established in the 1880s, when engineers aimed to prove their status as professionals by creating useful standards that would be widely adopted by manufacturers while satisfying corporate customers. Yates and Murphy explain how these engineers' processes provided a timely way to set desirable standards that would have taken much longer to emerge from the market and that governments were rarely willing to set. By the 1920s, the standardizers began to think of themselves as critical to global prosperity and world peace. After World War II, standardizers transcended Cold War divisions to create standards that made the global economy possible. Finally, Yates and Murphy reveal how, since 1990, a new generation of standardizers has focused on supporting the internet and web while applying the same standard-setting process to regulate the potential social and environmental harms of the increasingly global economy. * https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/engineering-rules Edit: Presentation from one of the co-authors: > Craig Murphy, Betty Freyhof Johnson ’44 Professor of Political Science, gives a book talk with insights into the realm of global standard setting that has shaped global industries such as technology, trade, construction and the environment. He reveals the ways in which the committees of global stakeholders, which include manufacturers, users, and unaffiliated engineers collaborated to develop these standards of compliance, and the impact of these standards on human livelihoods worldwide. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg19VO7TgR8

3pt14159 5y ago

I mean, I was ideologically outraged as a young adult when I found out that the Ontario building code must be followed by law but that it must be purchased for around $350 at the time. But I kinda get it now. Doing stuff the right way is hard. It takes big, sorta expensive books. It's not the end of the world.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
Establishing laws the right way may be hard, but following them is compulsory. I don't see why being forced to pay in order not to break the law shouldn't be an outrage.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  Yeah that's how I used to think too, but we can characterize it another way if we want to. The costs of upkeeping the codes that keep us safe should be born by those that test their limits. But in the end, to me it is much simpler than that: This is a minor annoyance at worst. Imagine losing a family member due to ignorance or recklessness of others. Or prolonged, acute illness due to a misdiagnoses and subsequent medication complication. An engagement ending without notice because you answered a question innocently and honestly and it caused them to re-think the whole thing. These are real problems. When life is rosy cosy a three inch thick book costing $350 may seem like an outrage, but it really isn't.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    I guess another way to look at this is just another tax that you have to pay. This tactic is underhanded though in that it favors those who don't pay the tax and take risks without knowing the code (they have more money left if they win the gamble). EDIT: plus, a "buy this law" tax is regressive: those who do the least work subject to this tax will bear the highest tax/unit of work costs. E.g. a private person remodelling their house will pay the same 300$ as the huge construction company. It also creates a hurdle for new entrants, who don't have any existing connections from whom they could borrow the book. When it comes to financing the research on law, there are ways that have better properties than those above (like a tax on work done).

loudmax 5y ago

> deliver essentially a set of Excel templates Ironically, Excel itself being another proprietary standard that's accepted as a necessity.

groone 5y ago
Open alternative standard. Also pretty good interoperability with Excel itself. http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.html http://docs.oasis-open.org/office/v1.2/OpenDocument-v1.2.htm...

jackvalentine 5y ago

The thing that drives me nuts in my day to day work is that the two ways you can get standards in Australia now require you to install an insane DRM plugin - it's worse than a regular 'protected' PDFs. And I say this as a SA contributor.

zohch 5y ago

Australia seems to be trying to outdo UK with absurd dystopinism.

deathhand 5y ago
Off topic but I think this happens when the stratification of society becomes very stagnant. The calcification creates pipelines of protectionalist thoughts that manifest in ego driven total surveillance or lobbying that protects industries furthering the calcification.

pfortuny 5y ago

It is not ISO then, it is the specific agency which makes them compulsory the one who should hand out the (allegedly much) money to ISO and make the documents available to those who must comply with the specific standard. But I agree that making some proprietary standard compulsory goes against any fair law, if there is no way to obtain that information easily from the Government.

colanderman 5y ago

I want to give a shout-out to the Indian government and whichever activists and legislators were responsible for the Right To Information laws. I was looking for IEC 60958 (the S/PDIF standard -- granted, not ISO but still proprietary) and found it available free on the Internet thanks to those laws, and presumably having been referenced in some other Indian law. The cover page [1] even includes affirmations of the right to knowledge. I wish other democracies could pull this off too. [1] https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S04/is.iec.60958.3.2003.pdf https://law.resource.org/pub/in/bis/S04/is.iec.60958.3.2003....

ajdlinux 5y ago

The ACT Legislative Assembly's Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety has repeatedly raised the issue of access to standards, as have other state parliaments like WA. Little has been done about it, even though they're asking for something as minimal as providing access to standards via public libraries. Apparently there was a COAG working group looking at the problem but they've seemingly achieved little, and they're not even aiming very high to begin with. https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/1609068/Access-to-Australian-Standards-adopted-in-legislationCorrespondencePaper.pdf https://www.parliament.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/000...

atoav 5y ago

It is a standard. If it is not publically readable it should not be allowed to call itself a standard. I am for legislation that defines standards as such. If you want a standard to be applied within the jurisdiction the first bar should be that it is publically readable.