The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has released details on its second standards simulation competition on October 27, 2017held in collaboration with John Deere. 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 four to 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.
Competition Details
The development of an actual, globally relevant voluntary consensus standard can take many months and multiple meetings. The simulation competition 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.
The October 27 competition will have two parts:
Presentation of requirements for a standard using no or minimal text (graphic)
A negotiation simulation to establish a new standard meeting the requirements
The no-text approach, very different from the traditional and lengthy documentation associated with standards, is intended to stimulate accessibility and enhance clarity and communication of essential aspects of the standard across cultures, languages and varying levels of technical understanding, and better align with social media.
Both competition parts will target complex vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication supporting advance alerts to threatening conditions and potential autonomous responses. Teams will be assigned negotiation position reflecting tradeoffs along several dimensions. Examples of no-text standards and background on the target standard will be provided and each team will be provided with the specifics of their task no less than 4 weeks in advance the October 27th event.
Judging & Prize Process
Judges from industries, universities, and ANSI's standards community will observe each team. They will assess "no-text output" and assign scores based on each team's strategies, tactics, interaction, and how well they meet 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/college 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.
ANSI and NIST held a similar event in October 2016 attended by Purdue University, the University of Maryland, the City College of New York, and The George Washington University. See the related news item: "ANSI and NIST Announce University Winners of International Standards Competition during World Standards Week."