I've written about standards before, such as the time when the Canadian Standards Association web site made a reference to 6:00 pm without specifying which of Canada's six time zones was being referenced. And then there's my post that referenced the sausage-making aspect of standards, the Jackson Family Honors, and Machiavelli.
Well, here's the newest about so-called "standards."
Mitch Wagner shared a post from Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic. In the post, Doctorow took note of this announcement:
Each year on 14 October, the members of IEC, ISO and ITU celebrate World Standards Day, which is a means of paying tribute to the collaborative efforts of the thousands of experts worldwide who develop the voluntary technical agreements that are published as International Standards.
At the same time, Doctorow noted a separate announcement:
Save the Date: The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has announced dates for World Standards Week 2020, which will be held October 19-23 in Washington, DC. ANSI's World Standards Week (WSW) is the standardization community's premier annual gathering, with multiple conferences, committee meetings, and special events designed to inspire open dialogue about standardization and conformity assessment.
Doctorow and others have noted that this appears to violate the principles of standards. At least in 2019, World Standards Day fell within World Standards Week:
World Standards Week is scheduled for November 4-8 this year, culminating in the main World Standards Day Conference on November 7.
Uh, strike that. That was ANSI's World Standards Day. The ISO World Standards Day occurred on October 14, 2019 as usual.
So why does ANSI move its world standards celebration around? Does ANSI have some odd calendar?
Perhaps I'm too harsh. Improbable Research applauded ANSI for at least being horseshoe-like close this year:
Some of America’s days are less than a week distant from the world’s World Standards Day.
I guess this is an application of the "sorta-" prefix.
