Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Shouldn't ANSI have provided nonvolatile instead of volatile?
Message-ID: <1990Feb16.172805.24168@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1117.18:37:35@stealth.acf.nyu.edu> <1990Feb8.162440.22318@utzoo.uucp> <1990Feb13.114041.4178@bath.ac.uk> <17950@rpp386.cactus.org>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 90 17:28:05 GMT

In article <17950@rpp386.cactus.org> woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) writes:
>... It seems that the
>average joe programmer can't influence things like standards committees
>easily.  How do you manage to get onto a commitee like that?

Basically, you pay a modest fee, and show up for the meetings.  It's not
difficult; if you look at the list of committee members in the drafts
(or, I assume, the final standard), you'll see a number who have no
institutional affiliation listed.  Having your employer's support helps
when it comes to the costs of attending meetings, but attendance in fact
isn't required, although it helps if you want to really have a voice in
things.  You can do it by mail.

Actually, the hardest part of being a standards-committee member is all
the massive piles of paper you have to wade through to do a good and
conscientious job.  People who've never tried it have no concept of what
a tedious chore it is, especially when maybe 75% of it is really dumb
ideas.  (Of course, *which* 75% is in the eye of the beholder...)  This
is why you don't see my name in the membership list for ANSI C -- I came
close to joining but decided I simply didn't have the time.

> How do you get to attend the meetings and present ideas?

Pay the fee and show up.  Actually you don't need to do either to present
ideas -- standards committees pay some degree of attention to most anything
that comes in the mail -- but it helps.

>I never found
> any addresses, schedules, contact points, meeting places or dates published in
>normal industry traderags, or special magazines, like DR. Dobbs,
>or PC week etc.... 

The information wasn't hard to find in programming-language publications,
or here on the net for that matter.  It's true that you won't find such
things in Newsweek or its PC equivalent; the assumption is that the folks
who are seriously interested will already be into programming languages
to a reasonable extent, and paying attention.
-- 
"The N in NFS stands for Not, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
or Need, or perhaps Nightmare"| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu