[ih] Quantifying OSI

[Carl Malamud]

Hmm. Amazing.

OTOH, there are apparently minutes for every meeting that ISO does, but of
course, the organization doesn't make anything secret and proprietary like
that available to the public (though there is a handbook for committee
chairs that includes directions on how to do things like the agenda and
minutes ... https://www.iso.org/files/live/sites/isoorg/files/store/en/PUB100415.pdf
).

Guessing NIST had a ton of employees going to ISO meetings, perhaps a FOIA
request (or several) is in order. Imagine they will have copies of meeting
minutes, enough to start to estimate the number of attendees and number of
meetings.

On Mon, May 11, 2026 at 4:16 PM John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:

> That would be hard to calculate for the US. There were 5 OSI main
> committees each with 15 - 20 or more participants in various subgroups. In
> the US, US corporations paid for the time and travel of their participants.
> Some companies (IBM, Honeywell, ATT, etc) would have multiple participants
> in the same committee. There were multiple US meetings between major
> international meetings every 9 months and international sub-group meetings
> between the 9 month major meetings.
>
> The cost was all paid by the companies participating. In addition, there
> were 802 meetings that were feeding into the OSI work. This was especially
> true of how network management was gotten off the dime to get around IBM
> stonewalling. All other 802 standards were process by an ISO committee,
> because some countries saw IEEE as a US organization.
>
> I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at how many people or companies were
> participating from the US. The Europeans did complain sometimes abut the
> large US delegations to the meetings.
>
> Take care,
> John Day
>
>
>
> > On May 10, 2026, at 23:53, Carl Malamud via Internet-history <
> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > Hi -
> >
> > I’m trying to quantify the size of the OSI efforts. I’ve seen the 25
> > million ECU investment by the EU, and have some pointers to US government
> > efforts. Has anybody tried to collect these numbers?
> >
> > Also very interested in non-monetary indicators. I have easy access to
> > number of IETF participants and count the traffic on mailing lists. Any
> > similar metrics for OSI? The best indicator so far is “many fine lunches
> > and dinners” but surely there has to be something more scientific.
> >
> > With best regards,
> >
> > Carl
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