ISO's rules of confidentiality

Not the same as TAG 176!
For the original cartoon,
see here.

Last year I joined TAG (Technical Advisory Group) 176: that's the American delegation to ISO's TC (Technical Committee) 176, which is in turn the committee that writes ISO 9001 and related standards. This lets me join discussions about upcoming developments in the standards, but it also imposes some strict limits on what I am allowed to say. I've alluded to these rules briefly in a couple of earlier posts, but maybe it would be useful for me to take a minute and spell them out clearly.

The point behind the rules is straightforward. On the one hand, it's only natural for people to want to talk about their work; and for people on any of the ISO Technical Committees, their committee contributions are an important part of their work in general. On the other hand, when the ISO publishes an international standard, that standard has (by definition) a very wide impact. A lot of people care about what goes into the standards. And it can be hard to focus on a technical discussion if your friends and neighbors are clamoring for you to take one side or the other ... or if opinion columns on the air or in the newspaper are bickering about it. There's also a good chance that the people arguing the loudest might have a weak grasp of the actual technical issues at stake. So for all these reasons it is clear that common sense requires some level of confidentiality for any discussions that are still under way.

The ISO has defined a set of rules governing communication of committee work, and published them in a booklet. You can download it for free from this link here. The booklet covers multiple topics, including how to participate in committee work and how long to retain documents, but I want to focus specifically on one area: what rules govern the communication of information about the work of committees and working groups, from committee members and to external parties.

(Note that the scope of the regulations is limited to committee members. If you go to a fortune-teller who uses psychic powers to divine what's happening inside the ISO committees, I'm pretty sure the pamphlet doesn't apply. At any rate, there's no reference to psychic powers anywhere in the pamphlet—I checked. 😀 But then you have to decide how accurate you think that report is likely to be.)

With all that said, here are the rules that apply to anything I say or write:

• I am not allowed to reveal the personal data of any other committee member. That's fine with me, because I have no interest in talking about persons. All I care about in this context are the ideas and proposals.
• I am allowed to say whether a specific vote passed or failed, but I'm not allowed to reveal how any particular individual or National Standards Body voted. But that's fine too. See above.
• I am not allowed to speak on behalf of any National Standards Body. That's fine; I wouldn't dream of it.
• I am not allowed to share any presentations or working documents. And I won't. If I mention that there was a discussion about this or that topic, I will base my remarks strictly on my own memory or my own notes. And I'll never say who was involved in the discussion, or who else agreed.
• If a committee finally arrives at a consensus opinion, I am allowed to say so.
• And I am allowed to express personal opinions, provided: that I identify them clearly as personal opinions; that I do not criticize or expose the views of others, that I do not speculate on the outcome of future decisions, and that I do not criticize the committee. But, as noted, I never want to talk about persons anyway. And I am confident that the committee will do the best that it can on any of the questions facing it.

These rules are on my mind because there is a Plenary Meeting of TAG 176 ongoing today and tomorrow, and one of the speakers reminded us of them. This speaker was talking about the status of one particular topic that has gotten a lot of attention lately, and urged us to be careful how we spoke about it so that people in the outside community didn't get the wrong idea. Among the specific pieces of advice we were given were these:

• Don't mislead anyone into thinking that changes to this or that standard are imminent. Even if we do decide to change something someday, there's a long process to go through before we get there.
• Don't mislead anyone into thinking that TAG 176 has an official position on the issue. Certain committee members have been involved in this or that discussion, and likely they all have personal opinions. But the TAG itself has not taken a position yet.
• Don't tell your friends they have to make radical changes to their businesses starting tomorrow, when we don't even know if anything will ever be decided ... or how.

All this sounds very practical to me. And it's good to be reminded.