The following are general statements of how to participate in the IEEE802.11 Working Group. For the official rules, please see the Policies and Procedures of the IEEE Project 802, LAN MAN Standards Committee (LMSC) and the IEEE 802.11 Working Group
IEEE P802.11 is a standards working group on wireless local area networks. The working group is a part of IEEE LMSC (LAN MAN Standards Committee) formerly called IEEE Project 802. IEEE LMSC reports to the Standards Activity Board (SAB) of the IEEE Computer Society.
All meetings of the standards activities of IEEE are open meetings. Everybody is allowed to attend as long as he/she pays their dues to the organization to offset the costs of the meeting. It is not required to be a member of IEEE to participate in, or to become a voting member of the working group. We recommend, however, that you become a member of either the IEEE or of the Computer Society.
At all meetings of the working group and its sub and ad-hoc groups, participation in the discussions and voting is limited to the voting members (see section Membership for the rules to become a member), although the chair has the discretion to allow non-members to participate in the discussions. At study-group meetings, however, all attendees can participate in discussions and in voting. The full voting rules are in LMSC Operating rules of IEEE P802 section 5.1.4.2
A handy guide for how to develop standards is provided in the IEEE Standards Companion (part1) and IEEE Standards Companion (part2). More formal rules regarding the organization of our work are provided in the IEEE Standards Board Bylaws and the IEEE Standards Operations Manual. A short summary made specifically for 802.11 follows below.
Before a standard can be developed, a Project Authorization Request (PAR) has to be approved by the IEEE Standards Board. The PAR approved for the work of 802.11 is available.
Once the working group has agreed on a draft standard (i.e. the draft was approved by a working group letter ballot), the draft is balloted in a so called Sponsor Balloting Group. Membership of balloting groups is limited to members of the IEEE or the Computer Society. After approval by the balloting group, the result is reviewed by the Standards Boards before publication. The IEEE Standards Board Review Committee (RevCom) review if the procedure for the development of the standard was followed correctly.
Currently the 802.11 standards working group meets 3 times a year during the plenary sessions of IEEE LMSC. LMSC meets in plenary sessions in March, July and November. For interim meetings of 802.11 refer to the meeting plan. The long term schedule for plenary meetings is provided in the Future Meeting Schedule.
Membership rules are provided in the "Policies and Procedures of IEEE Project 802, LAN MAN Standards Committee (LMSC)". In summary, membership belongs to an individual, not to an organization, and may not be transferred. You have to gain voting membership rights by participating in at least 2 plenary meetings out of 4 consecutive plenary meetings. Participation means that you attend at least 75% of the time of the whole session of meetings. You may substitute one interim meeting for a plenary meeting. Voting starts at the PLENARY session following the session at which you gained voting membership status.
The chair of IEEE 802.11 uses the following categories of membership:
Nearly voting members become voting members in the beginning of the first session they attend following their qualification for nearly-membership.
Before LMSC sends a proposed standard to the IEEE Standards Board for approval, they must have a positive response from a letter ballot among the members of the related ballot group within its organization. The Sponsor Ballot Group for the first proposal for an 802.11 standard has been established and can not be changed.
The rules and procedures for sponsor ballot groups are provided in section 5.4 of the IEEE Standards Operations Manual. In summary they are as follows. For each main PAR, LMSC establishes a ballot pool. If you want to be invited to participate in sponsor ballots of IEEE P802.11 and you are a member of the IEEE or of the IEEE Computer Society and are a member of the IEEE Sponsor Association (IEEESA), you can apply for being placed on the mailing list of this pool. A short time before a sponsor ballot is issued, the IEEE sends the people in the pool an invitation to ballot for the specific subject, e.g. of a new or a revised standards prepared by 802.11 or of an additional chapter. If you agree to commit to review and vote on the acceptability, you can apply for membership of the specific ballot group. LMSC is responsible for balancing the membership of the ballot group among three classifications: producer, user and general-interest.
All documents submitted to and produced by the P802.11 working Group, such as liaison statements, draft standards, minutes of meetings, meeting announcements, etc., are provided to the members of the working group by way of the IEEE802.11 web site http://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents and https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/documents outside of the meetings and an on-site server or by flash cards (as a last resort if the server is down) during meetings.
The Policies and Procedures of IEEE Project 802, LAN MAN Standards Committee require that Robert's Rules of Order are used in combination with the LMSC Policies and Procedures and the Working Group Policies and Procedures with the LMSC Policies and Procedure taking precedence.
The 802.11 Working Group Policies and Procedures requires that every document must be formatted before being submitted to the document server and presented in meetings. Special tools and instructions are available to make the task for submitters easy.
USEFUL LINKS TO OTHER SITES:
IEEE P802.11 WLANs RELATEDhttp://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents
and
https://mentor.ieee.org/802.11/documents
OTHER SITES
This page is maintained by Stuart J. Kerry and Harry Worstell. Comments are welcome.