ISO (International Organization for Standardization)

ISO (International Organization for Standardization)

For the past 50 years the ISO has really been in my opinion the biggest contributor to the world of standard creation and regulation on the planet. The organization is comprised of 2700 technical committees which report back to the secratariets of the 164 member countries. They evaluate standards from every aspect of engineering from housewares to computers. This method of setting standards internationally allows the world to continue to innovate quickly because things do not have to be engineered from scratch each and every time. Some of the most vital standards I found on their website in terms of technology are the programming language standards. I was able to find the standards for nearly every language I had heard of. By having a place that regulates these technologies people are able to learn how to use something like C++ and apply that knowledge seamlessly regardless of where they are coding.

ITU (International Telecommunications Union)

Because such a vast majority of technology relies on being able to transfer data from place to place the telecommunications industry has to be involved. By having standards within this industry allow for the seamlessly integration of the transfer of data. Two standard which have dominated the global telecommunications market are types of cell phones. There is now a 100% chance that the phone in your pocket runs off of the GSM or CDMA standard.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

The IEEE basically set the standards for nearly everything that has to do with electronics. Without this group we would not have standardized electrical. Believe it or not IEEE writes about one third of the technical documentation written on electrical engineering, computer science, and electronics. Quite possibly their most influential standard would be that of the 802 networking standard. We have uniformly created a way for computers to access the internet when in range of a transmission device like a router.

IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)

The internet engineering task force is basically responsible for the internet protocol suite. Standards must be set and clearly defined as technology evolves that tells computers how to communicate to one another. Without the IETF we would not have something I actually had the chance to use tonight, Ethernet. Without Ethernet cables we would not have the ability to transfer data at the speeds we can today.

ISOC (Internet Society)

W3C (World-Wide Web Consortium)

The W3C’s most prominent influence on standards was with the technology we know as HTML. Upon the initial implementation of the internet html did exist however it was not uniform across all the developers out there. The consortium was initially founded by Tim Berner’s Lee to help in mending the bridge between different vendors involved in the development of the Internet.

European Telecommunications Standards Institute

The ETSI is very much similar to the ITU I wrote about earlier in this paper. The difference is mostly that their focus is centralized on a few dozen European countries. What they are best known for is the regulation of bandwidth throughout the continent. It really is hard to believe that we now need entire committees to regulate electronic signals and vibrations in the air.