[tz] Today's CalConnect event

[Kim Davies]

Quoting Paul.Koning at dell.com on Tuesday February 05, 2019:
>
> >> Yes, it's unlikely that (for example) the government of São Tomé and Príncipe
> >> would notify the ISO more reliably than they notify us.
> > 
> > They might as ISO is a treaty org like ICAO and IATA: govs and their airlines
> > seem to promptly forward TZ and DST updates to local times for schedules and
> > tickets, as the pols would not want to be inconvenienced on their "business" trips.
> 
> My understanding is that ISO is *not* a treaty organization but a non-government body.  I notice that the Wikipedia article does not contain the word "treaty".  Also, the members of ISO are not countries but national standards organizations; for example, the US member of ISO is ANSI.

We work with ISO on some other standards (nothing to do with timezones)
and I relayed this discussion to our internal team. Here is some
feedback that may be useful from a colleague:

  Normally the ISO organisation is not running any registry (Maintenance
  Agency or Registry Authority in ISO speak) by itself. The big
  exception is MA 3166 (country codes) but for the rest it is done by
  outside organisations which are officially recognised by ISO. If
  there are multiple parts, these might actually be served by different
  registries. An example for ISO 639 (language codes) can be found at UN
  Infoterm <http://www.infoterm.info>. They list themselves for 639-1,
  Library of Congress for 639-2 and 639-5, SIL international for 639-3
  and Geolang for 639-6 although I think that 639-6 is now withdrawn. As
  an example of an RA see also <http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/>.

  The only ISO standard related to time (-zones) is ISO 8601. That
  one is owned by TC 154/WG 5 "Representation of dates and times”.
  CalConnect is a proud liaison A to this TC 154 (and a lot of others,
  see https://www.calconnect.org/about/liaisons-and-relationships
  for a complete list and the personnel involved). The TC
  154 seems to be very active in updating and extending 8601
  (See also https://www.iso.org/news/2017/02/Ref2164.html and
  https://www.iso.org/organization/6412349.html).

  It seems that CalConnect is actively involved in this work. And
  indeed, they have on their site some information about that. At
  https://www.calconnect.org/about/major-work-projects they seem to be
  interested in a Timezone service and registry - "Full timezone support
  via dynamic server calls rather than embedding timezone information
  in events - no more having event times wrong when timezones change
  and your software isn't updated”. Since ISO only merely facilitates
  the development of standards I think that the ISO person mentioned
  is actually one of the liaisons to TC 154 speaking about the work in
  WG 5. 

In short, ISO is a forum for standards development and unlikely to play
any operational role in maintaining any speculated registry. This is
perhaps akin to the split of responsibilities between the IETF and IANA.

kim