Standardization News

What makes ASTM standards different? This is a question I hear frequently and often answer by rote. They represent the highest quality technical content. They keep pace with current technology and technological changes. They quickly adapt to market and regulatory needs and drivers. They reflect broad, diverse, and balanced input. 

All true. But these are just the visible results of what makes them different and makes a difference. Above all else, every ASTM standard is built on our unique brand of a voluntary consensus process in which every negative vote must be addressed. This puts tremendous power in every voice regardless of membership status, expertise, representation, geography, demography, or anything else. It sounds simple. It’s not. It requires a strong commitment to broad and deep collaboration to bring together the widest possible spectrum of stakeholders, empower them to collaborate, and facilitate that collaboration to reach consensus. It’s the difference-maker that happens beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) so to speak, to borrow a term from our cover feature).

That’s why collaboration is one of ASTM’s five core values. 

We seek it and see it in our work every day. We see it within the work of our committees, as you’ll see in the feature on gate safety. We see it in our memorandum of understanding (MoU) program, empowering other countries and their national standards bodies to participate in the ASTM process, bringing their important and valuable experience to the table. And we see it in our programs and offerings, such as our centers of excellence, which harness the expertise of industry, academia, government agencies, and others to identify gaps, support education programs, and accelerate standards development in key industries.

Collaboration among our staff and members leads to the creation of important technical documents like white papers and technical reports, the launch of training courses, and the promotion of podcasts, press releases, and SN articles.

As standardization continues to evolve – and to start earlier in research and technology development; to drive and support rather than lag commercialization; to address transversal technologies rather than vertical industries and markets; to prioritize global applicability over regional differentiation – collaboration and harmonization become increasingly important.  

Standardization is occurring early enough in the technology-development process that applications and end uses are largely unknown. Applications that are, and may remain for some time, BVLOS. Standardization in these emerging technologies demands greater emphasis on collaboration that runs deeper through supply chains; more broadly across multiple and often unrelated industries; and more intentionally across a wider spectrum of potential stakeholders and end users.

It also requires more intentional and open collaboration and harmonization between multiple standards developers, national standards bodies, regulators, and policymakers around the world to increase the velocity, agility, and common acceptance of standardization in rapidly developing and evolving technologies and industries. You can learn more about this collaboration and the value and impact of harmonization efforts in the feature on drones in this issue. 

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting many of our standards-development and national standards body partners across Asia and Europe to continue building meaningful opportunities for collaboration and harmonization. Building relationships and specific standards collaborations will advance standards and transform markets to help our world work better. ●

Andrew G. Kireta Jr.
President, ASTM International