ANSI strives to facilitate consumer participation in the voluntary consensus standards process by informing consumers and consumer representatives of standardization activities and conducting outreach to consumer advocacy and public interest groups to help identify representatives to participate in such activities. Promoting consumer participation in these activities allows consumers and consumer representatives to make a difference, develop topic expertise on a standard, and to become an expert on the standards development process.
ANSI works to inform consumers about how the standardization system works and how they can actively participate via outreach to consumer representatives and groups, updated Web content, and the following weekly publications, available for free:
To help ensure voluntary standards reflect the consumer perspective, ANSI offers guidance on how consumer representatives can participate in various areas of standardization activity:
ANSI encourages and helps consumer representatives get involved in the American National Standards (ANS) development process.
The American National Standards (ANS) section of ANSI.org provides detailed information on how all members of the general public – including consumers – can get involved in the ANS process.
U.S. consumer representatives have numerous opportunities to have their voices heard in the activities of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
ANSI encourages consumer representatives to review and comment on proposed revisions—or propose your own changes—to a number of key procedural documents that govern the Institute’s processes. The links below provide information on the maintenance process for these documents:
Consumers are encouraged to join ANSI—if they aren’t members already—for access to influential participation and leadership opportunities in ANSI governance bodies and forums, including the following:
In 2022 ANSI launched a Consumer Participation Fund to help mitigate financial barriers to consumer engagement in the voluntary consensus standards system.
