Standards development and committees

Technical Committees (TC)

Our technical committees each address various standardisation activities in a specific technology area.

Our committees are coordinated by our Operational Coordination Group (OCG), which includes the chairs of all our technical committees. Ultimately the committees are accountable to the ETSI Board and the General Assembly.

• Our members decide what work we do and we make it as easy as possible to start a new activity.
• Each committee establishes and maintains a work programme, which is made up of individual items of work. Collectively, the work programmes of all our committees constitute the ETSI Work Programme.
• Each ‘Work Item’ describes a specific standardisation task and results in a single standard, report or other document. We produce different types of standards to meet industry needs.

Industry Specification Groups (ISG)

Industry Specification Groups operate alongside our traditional standards-making committees in a specific technology area. They are designed to be quick and easy to set up. They provide an effective alternative to the creation of industry fora.

ISGs have considerable autonomy:

• membership of an ISG may consist of both ETSI members and non-members (subject to certain conditions)
• they have their own voting rules
• they decide their own work programme
• they produce Group Specifications (GSs) or Group Reports (GRs) to be published by ETSI
• they draft and approve these specifications themselves

Software Development Groups (SDG)

ETSI’s Software Development Groups combine the best of ETSI’s standardisation support with the tools and processes required for successful collaborative software development.

Developing software alongside standards can provide the following benefits:

• Earlier validation of standards
• Accelerated standardisation process through faster and regular feedback
• Improved quality of standards
• Increased adoption of standards through availability of software and tools

All ETSI Software Development Groups (SDGs) feature a basic governance model derived from ETSI’s experience in open, transparent standards development, made flexible to cater for SDGs of all sizes. Each group maintains its own detailed working procedures and release management processes. Each ETSI SDG can choose a software license which is best suited to their needs, including Open Source licenses.

On an operational level, ETSI provides the required IT support and industry-standard tools. An ETSI-hosted Gitlab environment is available, together with a website, wiki, e-mail lists, conf-call and discussion channels for each group.

Task Forces

Our Specialist Task Forces (STFs) and Testing Task Forces (TTFs) are teams of highly skilled experts. They are brought together to perform specific technical work under the direction of one of our technical committees. This committee is responsible for approving the standards produced by the STF/TTF.

The task forces enable us to accelerate the standardisation process in areas of strategic importance and in response to urgent market needs.