Subject: Fwd: [SC 22 Convenors] ITTF updates

From: Steve Lionel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:54:16 -0500

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: David Keaton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, Nov 10, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Subject: [SC 22 Convenors] ITTF updates
To:

Dear SC 22 Convenors,

      In this week's JTC 1 plenary, ITTF has provided us some updates on
pending issues.  Feel free to pass the information along to interested
people in your WGs.

* There are no updates to the Directives for 2025 because they are being
rewritten to harmonize between ISO, IEC, and JTC 1.

* New editions of the directives normally appear in May, and were
previously expected in May, 2026.  Now the Directives Part 1 rewrite is
expected in Q3 or Q4 of 2026, and the next Directives Part 2 update is
expected in 2027.  (This means that paragraph numbers will definitely
not be allowed in final published documents before 2027 at the earliest,
even if JTC 1's pending request, submitted by SC 22, is approved.)

* The Online Standards Development (OSD) platform is the default for new
documents.  A technical justification is required to develop a standard
in a different way.  (Many of our standards are developed in LaTeX and
maintained in git, which qualifies as a technical justification.)  If
you decide to use the OSD, be aware that ISO editors will be able to go
in and make any change to your document at any time, and there may not
always be a way to be alerted when this happens.  We have it better than
IEC-based committees, which are not allowed any exceptions to using the
OSD, even technical ones.

* Documents that are available for zero cost have now been moved from
the old, obscure, ITTF web page into the ISO and IEC web stores.  Due to
the new publicity that this provides, free standards are downloaded four
times more often than before.  ISO and IEC have lost some revenue from
this, because the previous arrangement tricked some people into paying
for standards that they could have received for free.

* JTC 1 Standing Document 23 on Document Access allows us the freedom to
make certain working documents available to the public.  ISO has been
trying to shut that down, and JTC 1 has pushed back hard, using
ammunition from SC 22 and other SCs.  ISO and IEC are resisting, partly
because national bodies are currently allowed to sell working drafts and
committee drafts for revenue.  The debate rages on, and definitely will
not conclude before the topic is discussed in major ISO and IEC business
meetings in March, 2026.  (In separate communication, the JTC 1 chair
indicated to me that he believed the issue would not be settled before
the middle of 2026.)  While the debate continues, we are still allowed
to operate under the existing SD 23 rules.  When a settlement is
reached, we will definitely lose the right to make some things public,
but hopefully not everything.  Old documents that were made public while
SD 23 was in force will not be required to be withdrawn from the public.

                                        David