ANSI's role in standards development

ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, the US national coordinating institute for voluntary standards. Typically, you will see ANSI in a standard's name followed by some letters and numbers such as X3.181-1980. These characters represent the full name of the standard and the year it was published. Does this mean that ANSI wrote the standard and published it? No. ANSI itself does not write standards. ANSI develops the procedures that standards developing organizations, SDOs, use to develop standards. It also reviews the procedures and processes that the SDOs use, and in the end approves the standards that SDOs develop to become ANSI standards. For many industries, it is very important to have the name of the standard include ANSI because ANSI is respected, is known throughout the world, and has an excellent track record of openness and fairness. All IEEE standards developed by the Computer Society and many other groups automatically seek ANSI approval after they become approved IEEE standards