Public Review changes

At the end of the BIG-EU/BACnet International Liaison Group teleconference early this morning (my time, for my European colleagues it was late afternoon) I was asked to find out when the spring BACnet meetings were likely to occur so that the BIG-EU plugfest wouldn't be likely to coincide.

It should have been a simple matter but of course it wasn't. All I had to do was to get a copy of the the current PC MOP (Project Committee Manual Of Procedures*) from the ASHRAE website and look it up in the back. Except that I couldn't find the PC MOP. There was something that looked like it, called the TC MOP, but it didn't have the table in it. So I sent off a note to the current chair, and learned about his difficulties in trying to schedule meetings to occur shortly after public review periods end so that the committee can work on the received comments right away. In any event, he gave me the projected dates so I could proceed but there was also a note about a change in the public review system for standards that are not code-intended.

In any event, I finally located the PC MOP, updated just two weeks earlier, and went to the table in Appendix I. But Appendix I was gone. It ended at Appendix H, which has public review periods for code-intended standards.

So it looks like a long-discussed change is in the works and we won't be locked into the twice-yearly cycle that has slowed the deployment of new material.

This could be a good thing.

* I still like the old name better: Manual for Processing ASHRAE Standards, MPAS, pronounced "impasse."