5 Steps to Creating Structure from Technological Chaos

These days, a variety of SMPTE document types are available to technology suppliers to best suit the technology, current market conditions, and business opportunity they are pursuing. SMPTE and its members oversee and orchestrate a variety of processes to develop documents and registers of metadata.

The creation of Standards (STs), Recommended Practices (RPs) and Engineering Guidelines (EGs) involves full due process, whereas the creation of public Committee Drafts (public CDs), Registered Disclosure Documents (RDDs), Engineering Reports, and metadata registers is subject to either a partial due process or to controlled publishing.

The process looks like this:

• Start a Project
  The Administrative Guideline (AG) Form AG-06 “New Project Worksheet” is used to start a new project. It outlines details like the problem to be solved, the scope of work, the SMPTE Technology Committee (TC) members who will be involved, and an estimated completion date. Once submitted, the SMPTE Standards VP discusses the project via the completed AG06 with SMPTE TC chairs to determine its validity, assign a Technology Committee (TC) and create a draft project on SMPTE’s online collaboration platform.
  
  
• Secure Project Approval
  The draft project will go through a review and approval process that takes a few weeks. Once the project is approved, a drafting group (DG) is formed to write the document. Any SMPTE member can join a drafting group.
  
  
• Write a Document
  SMPTE provides several AG’s with forms and templates (e.g. AG-04) that lay the foundation for actually writing the various document types so that SMPTE documents are compatible with the ISO style. All AG’s and the Standards Operations Manual (OM) which describes the SMPTE process are available.
  
  
• Gain TC Support
  Once the document is created it can be put forward by the DG as a Working Draft (WD) for review by the assigned TC. After a comment period with time to address those comments, the document becomes a Committee Draft (CD). At this point, and with the approval of the Standards VP, it can become a public document (public CD). The public CD process allows for an early view of a proposed document and test implementations. Feedback from those implementations into the SMPTE document development process can further improve a document under consideration. The CD goes to a Final Committee Draft (FCD) ballot and, after another round of comment resolutions, the document becomes an FCD. Another review and a Draft Publication (DP) vote ensure that FCD comments were properly addressed. The document is now officially a DP.
  
  
• Obtain Verification From the Standards Committee
  After passing the DP vote, the document passes through a Standards Committee (ST) vote that indicates the SMPTE process was followed correctly. Document approved!

The document is approved! After final review and preparation by the SMPTE home office staff, a document is published on the IEEEXplore Digital Library.

A variety of technical expertise is required to facilitate the development of SMPTE standards documents, so consider joining the standards community.