Christian,
Zhi has captured the essence.
ITU-T has several classes of membership:
- The highest, since ITU is an organization under the umbrella of the United
Nations, are "member states". This consists of the 190 or so countries that
are members of the United Nations. In study groups that deal with regulatory
and tariff issues, the governments are often sources of some of the material
to be considered. In a more technical study group (like Study Group 15),
governments tend to fill the role of determining if there is consensus of
industry within the country, and forwarding that as a national position.
- The next class of membership is Recognized Operating Agencies. These are
network operators.
- The next class (equivalent in rights to the operators) is called Scientific
and Industrial Organizations. While any such organization can join, these
are generally equipment or component vendors.
- The final class are called "Associates", who pay a lower level of dues to
participate in a single Study Group.
Each country can determine their own national process through which national
positions are determined. In the US, it is customary to take proposed national
positions first to a related US standards organization (ANSI committee T1X1
for most of ITU-T Study Group 15) to develop the industry consensus, and then
to a US State Department committee (US Study Group B is the one which feeds
Study Group 15) which generally (not always) follows the recommendation of the
US standards organization in whether something should be forwarded as a national
position under the "member state" membership. Since in most cases, the national
standards organizations have looked at these documents first, the meetings of
the US State Department committees tend to be relatively short (1/2 day or so,
often by conference call).
As far as I understand the UK process, they have a national committee per
ITU-T Study Group which can approve national positions when there is industry
consensus. Since the UK does not have similar national standards organizations,
they must also look into the technical details of the contributions. This
results in a longer meeting (I think a couple of days, from what I have heard)
to develop any UK national positions for ITU-T Study Group 15.
Getting a national position in countries with significant industrial
participation
is no small feat, so contributions such as this are generally taken very
seriously.
Hope this helps.
Steve
"Lin, Zhi-Wei (Zhi)" wrote:
Hi Christian,
This is one of the processes within the ITU-T standards body. The documents
that is submitted into these documents can have multiple levels of "status".
I'm not sure what the process is within the UK, but I have some idea of the
process within the USA. Maybe Stephen Trowbridge or others more familiar with
the procedures can comment (I typically try to stay away from these and stick
my head into the technical stuff).
The lowest status is that a document is sent by a company. In this case only
that company is known to support this. A document may also have multiple
company names as contributors, in which case these companies are active
proponents.
The next level status is a country document. A country document (e.g., USA or
UK) means that the document has undergone a national standards process, and
that ALL the companies represented within that country will support the
position stated by the document.
This is of course much different from the IETF process, where all documents
are by individual basis (theoretically it should not even have company
affiliation but only represents the views of the individuals in the author
list, but of course practically most people who attends and submits documents
are actually representing a company view)...please don't flame me, just
giving an observation based on my limited exposure to the IETF process...
Hope this helps
Zhi
-----Original Message-----
From: Christian de Larrinaga [mailto:cdel(_at_)firsthand(_dot_)net]
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 10:17 AM
To: Lin, Zhi-Wei (Zhi); iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org;
Wijnen, Bert
(Bert); Scott Bradner (E-mail); kireeti(_at_)juniper(_dot_)net
Cc: Stephen Shew (E-mail); Lyndon Ong (E-mail); Malcolm Betts (E-mail);
Lam, Hing-Kam (Kam); Alan McGuire (E-mail);
sjtrowbridge(_at_)lucent(_dot_)com;
Dimitrios Pendarakis (E-mail)
Subject: RE: Last Call: CR-LDP Extensions for ASON to Informational
Lin Zhi-Wei
You mention a UK national position paper. Can you give me the references and
what made this "national"?
many thanks,
Christian de Larrinaga
A clear U.K. national position paper was
contributed to the meeting currently underway
(delayed contribution 483), supporting that all
three of the ASON signaling Recommendations
should be put for consent at this meeting.
Hope this helps...
Zhi