Ian Cheong wrote: > At 1:44 pm +0800 19/3/06, Richard Hosking wrote: >> Looking at the site it seems that SAIGlobal is an unashamedly >> commercial business. I guess there is no reason why standards >> development shouldnt be commercial (is there?). > > I understand the standards writing organisation is separate from the > marketing organisation. See: > www.standards.org.au
Yes, a bit of detail is given here: http://www.standards.org.au/cat.asp?catid=21 >> But how does this fit with the work done by committees? Do members get >> paid? > > No members get paid for committee work. >From the above URL: <quote> "Acknowledging our Committee Members Our Technical Committee members are the lifeblood of standardization. They willingly give their time and expertise to advance the principles and practices of standardization. Their contribution to Australia's well-being cannot be overestimated. Although they give their time freely, it is estimated that their contribution is worth more than $30 million per year to the national interest. Funding and Finance Following the sale of its commercial businesses and the floating of SAI Global in December 2003, Standards Australia's income is derived principally from investments (66%) and royalties from SAI Global (16%). The remainder represents fees for service from the Commonwealth Government (13%) for activities in the national interest, in particular international standardizing activities, and some miscellaneous activities." </quote> So committee members contribute $30m worth of time each year to create standards documents which Standards Aust licenses to SAI Global to flog to end users, and Standards Aust gets some royalties on those sales. The sensible thing, if you are a committee member, would be to buy lots of shares in SAI Global in the hope of getting some financial benefit from all your hard committee work. But of course you don't need to be a committee member to buy SAI Global shares. >> Presumably Standards Australia owns the IP - why would I work on a >> committee on anything but a commercial basis to increase the profits >> of a private company? It seems like Stds Aust does retain the IP and just licenses the standards to SAI Global to flog on their behalf. However, if only 16% of Standards Aust revenue is from royalties on sales via SAI Global, one has to ask the question, why do they bother? Better to trim their costs by 20% (less salubrious head office premises for example) and just make their standards products freely available to everyone? Yeah, I already know the answer to that... Although I find all these selling-the-work-of-unpaid-committees-and-contributors arrangements a bit strange, I think that the main areas for reform are the transparency of the committee membership process (including diversification of committee membership and mandatory and publicly-accessible declarations of conflicts of interest), making committee mtgs virtual or more accessible to members who can't attend in person or in business hours, making minutes of all committee meetings publicly available, and providing much better mechanisms for input and active contribution form non-committee members from the earliest phases of standards development, again with complete transparency of all contributions. Given that we are talking about standards which will guide activity in a sector of the economy which is of personal importance to everyone, and which consumes about 10% of GDP, I think that the Australian people deserve nothing less. Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
