International Organization for Standardization

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Organization for Standardization, known the world over simply as ISO, was founded on the 23rd of February 1947, and in the decades since it has published over 25,000 international standards. That is a staggering output for a body that operates entirely on consensus. Think about what it means to agree on anything across 175 countries, each with its own language, economy, and engineering tradition. How does that agreement actually happen? Who is in the room? And what happens when powerful interests try to tilt the table? The story of ISO reaches back to before the Second World War, winds through a London meeting in October 1946, and touches everything from the sensitivity of camera film to the dimensions of the shipping container. What does it take to make the world's nations agree on what "equal" means?

• 2. Before ISO Existed

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  In 1926, long before the United Nations existed, an organization called the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations came into being. Known by the abbreviation ISA, it focused primarily on mechanical engineering. The ISA carried on through the interwar years, but the Second World War brought it to a halt. The organization was suspended in 1942 as the conflict consumed the institutions that had sustained it. When the war ended, the ISA did not simply restart. Instead, a newly formed body called the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee approached the ISA with a proposal: dissolve the old framework and build something new. In October 1946, delegates from 25 countries gathered in London. The ISA and the UNSCC sat down together, and what emerged from those meetings was an agreement to create the International Organization for Standardization. The new body officially opened for business on the 23rd of February 1947, less than two years after the war's end. Its very first published document, ISO 1, appeared in 1951 under the original designation ISO/R 1, because early ISO standards were formally called "ISO Recommendations" before the naming convention changed.

• 3. What Is In a Name

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  A persistent misconception follows ISO wherever it travels: that the letters stand for "International Standardization Organization" or some equivalent phrase in another language. The organization itself has addressed this directly. Because the full English name would abbreviate to IOS, and the French name Organisation internationale de normalisation would abbreviate to OIN, the founders chose a single short form that would work across languages. They derived it from the Greek word isos, meaning "equal", so the name could be the same whatever the country or language of the reader. The three official languages of ISO are English, French, and Russian, and the headquarters sits in Vernier, in the Swiss canton of Geneva. There is a footnote worth adding: during the founding meetings themselves in 1946, nobody apparently invoked the Greek word explanation. Scholars have noted that the etymology may therefore be a false one, a tidy story attached to the name after the fact. Both the name ISO and the ISO logo are registered trademarks, and their use is formally restricted.

• 4. How Standards Are Made

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  A proposal moves through six stages before it can be called an International Standard. It begins as a Preliminary Work Item, and the path ends at the Publication stage, with stops at Proposal, Preparatory, Committee, Enquiry, and Approval in between. Technical committees and subcommittees drive the work, and they can set up working groups of experts to draft the initial documents. ISO has over 800 such technical committees and subcommittees in operation. A working draft stays internal to the working group until it is mature enough to circulate as a Committee Draft to the participating national bodies, which then submit formal comments. Once a consensus to proceed is established, the subcommittee produces a Draft International Standard, which is open to national bodies for voting and comment over a period of five months. The final approval ballot, conducted once a document reaches Final Draft International Standard status, runs for two months. A two-thirds majority of participating members in favour, with negative votes not exceeding one quarter of all votes cast, is the threshold for passage. The process also includes a fast-track procedure, which allows a document developed outside of ISO to be submitted directly for approval, bypassing certain intermediate stages if it already meets the required degree of maturity. MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group, offers a useful illustration of the working-group structure: as of 2023, it operates as a collection of seven working groups within ISO/IEC JTC 1.

• 5. The OOXML Controversy

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  Around 2007, criticism of ISO's standardization process grew pointed. Members were failing to respond to ballots, and the prescribed timelines were slipping on large, complex standards. One episode crystallized the concerns. Office Open XML, a document format developed by Microsoft, moved through ISO/IEC JTC 1 under a rapid fast-track procedure and was approved in April 2008 as ISO/IEC 29500. The computer security entrepreneur and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth publicly described the process as damaging to public confidence. He alleged that Microsoft had lobbied countries that had not traditionally participated in ISO and had stacked technical committees with employees and partners sympathetic to Office Open XML. His words were blunt: he described ISO as "an engineering old boys club" and argued that the process was not designed to withstand intensive corporate lobbying. Martin Bryan, the outgoing convenor of working group 1 of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, later noted that ISO's rules were eventually tightened as a consequence. Participating members that fail to respond to votes are now demoted to observer status. OpenDocument had taken a different path to ISO approval: the standards body OASIS used a publicly available specification process to obtain recognition of OpenDocument as ISO/IEC 26300, which was approved in May 2006, two years before OOXML.

• 6. ISO in Everyday Life

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  Disk images stored with a .iso file extension take that name from ISO 9660, the file system standard the format follows. The film speed of a camera roll, the number that photographers use to describe how sensitive a given film is to light, is defined by three ISO standards: ISO 6, ISO 2240, and ISO 5800. The flash hot shoe on a camera was originally defined in ISO 518 and is still commonly called the "ISO shoe." ISOBUS, the communication protocol used across the agriculture industry, traces back to ISO 11783. ISOFIX, the standardized attachment system for child safety seats found in cars, comes from ISO 13216. And ISO 668 defines the dimensions of the intermodal shipping containers that move goods on trains, trucks, and cargo ships around the globe. In each of these cases, the standard became so widely adopted that the ISO designation became the common name for the product itself. The Lawrence D. Eicher Award, one of several prizes ISO presents to recognize outstanding contributions to international standardization, is open to all ISO and ISO/IEC technical committees, and reflects the organization's effort to keep the work of its technical professionals visible.