The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in collaboration with John Deere, will hold its second standards simulation competition on October 27, 2017. The event, open to undergraduate or graduate students on the West Coast, is intended for university teams to create fictional, globally relevant voluntary standards, a process that will exercise participant strategy and negotiation skills. San Jose State University in Santa Clara, California, will host the competition.
Building on the success of the 2016 competition, the simulation event will consist of university teams - each with five students and one professor - who will represent stakeholders in the development of an international standard. Ideally, teams will represent students from across multiple disciplines, including design and art.
While the development of an actual, globally relevant voluntary consensus standard may take months and multiple meetings, the simulation is intended to condense the effort into an informative and fun day of strategy and negotiation. Standards development is increasingly complex, voluminous and must cross cultural and language barriers, and requires varying levels of technical understanding. To encourage teams to grasp the essence of a standard and to dig deeper into its subtleties and impact in application, the simulation will focus on the development of a text free or minimal text (visual) international standard.
Specifics of this challenging task and the requirements of each team to meet the competition objectives will be provided no less than four weeks in advance of the October 27th event.
Judges from ANSI's standards community will observe each team's strategies, tactics, and interactions, and will make recommendations for scores based on how well each team has met its objectives in the development of the final standard. Together, the full judging panel will determine a first-place team who most effectively met their objectives. Prizes will be awarded to each member of the winning team.
Participation in the competition is open to university teams only, and space is limited to no more than six teams. Additionally, multi-disciplinary teams, consisting of undergraduate or graduate students is highly encouraged.
To be considered for participation in the competition, universities, professors, and/or students should contact [email protected] as soon as possible. If individual students or small groups are interested, please also contact [email protected] and ANSI will consider forming a team unaffiliated with a university, if space allows.
ANSI encourages stakeholders to share this information and related flyer with any potential stakeholder participants and universities.