Feburary 13, 2012

 SAWE Joins with ANSI

The Society of Allied Weight Engineers has joined the United States American National Standards Institute (ANSI) with full organizational membership privileges.  To continue our Society’s drive to improve membership value we have joined ANSI as a further step towards the process of becoming an ANSI Accredited Standards Developer (ASD).  This move increases not only the value of  individual membership but also that of  Corporate Members which subscribe to society sponsorship at Corporate Partner levels of participation.  As a Corporate Partner companies are intimately integrated with proposed ASD accredited standards development procedures. National and international standards increasingly require development in a consensus-based “open community” to be adopted by using organizations such as governments and industrial suppliers. SAWE, its members, and its current recommended practice developments process defines an international open community of mass properties experts and members with particular interest in standards content.  We are moving forward with our Standards and Practices Committee (SPC) and our SPC sub-committees (military aircraft, marine, offshore marine, airline affairs, missiles & space, and ground transportation) to implement policies which adhere to ANSI “Essential Requirements for an ASD”. These policies include well defined consensus body definition processes, document configuration management, voting records management, coordination of standards among multiple parties of particular interest, and general harmonization of mass properties issues for that community.  We are well positioned, at both a national and international level, to take on this task. SAWE leadership will be asking for more specific help through our SPC and SPC sub-committee structure for participation in defining our implementation and promoting it to ANSI. We have the appropriate information management technology and organizational structure to be accepted as an ANSI ASD and will be clarifying those over the coming months. A topic of discussion at this year’s international conference in May will be how the society converges on our final standards development process. 

We hope you will join the process, through your interest and participation in SPC committee work or by providing input directly to our SPC committee chair.  More information about ANSI can be found at www.ansi.org . Note also that SAWE has a strong U.S. background but is an international organization. Standards development internationally is through the International Standards Organization (ISO) as a global activity. Our members from all countries are encouraged to participate in the SPC committee activities and may desire to influence standards development in their country through a similar ISO member body as ANSI for their particular country.  Country ISO member bodies are found at http://www.iso.org/iso/about/iso_members.htm.