ABSTRACT
Standards are developed in a variety of ways that tend to converge around the methods of the so-called Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs) and the methods of Consortia. Also important (to engineers) are the fire codes of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). The National Electrical Code (NEC), produced by the NFPA, is one of the more important codes for electrical engineers, along with the IEEE National Electrical Safety Code, which relates to electrical transmission lines and related power engineering equipment. Consortia methods, for the most part, were promoted to speed up standards setting in fast-moving areas such as information technology and communications on the Web. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards setting has little in the way of extensive review and due process that is demanded of SDOs. The development methods for codes depend entirely on the organizational practices of the code maker.
