A2LA Today l December 2016 l Number 133
By Trace McInturff, Senior Director of Accreditation Services
CASCO Working Group (WG) 44 held its fifth meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on 20-23 September 2016 at the ISO headquarters. Forty-One delegates and nineteen liaison members were in attendance plus eight additional members via Webex.
ANSI was represented by Werner Schaefer (Schaefer Associates) and Trace McInturff (A2LA).
The main purpose of this WG 44 meeting was the resolution of issues and comments brought forward by the Drafting Group (DG) that met in July 2016 to address the comments received on the second Committee Draft (CD). Numerous issues had been identified by the Drafting Group that required discussion and/or a decision by the whole Working Group. The conveners explained the way the DG proceeded in July and presented a list of “key issues” generated by the DG to be addressed by the WG members before the meeting.
The conveners drew the group’s attention to the CD2 ISO/IEC 17025 ballot result and highlighted the strong consensus (96% of CASCO members voted in favor of the CD2) to move to the Draft International Standard (DIS) stage. The WG took the decision to move the document to the DIS stage.
Decisions about the next meetings:
a) The DG will meet to pre-review and propose observations for DIS comments from 1-3 May 2017, in Vancouver, Canada. A call for experts will be launched by the CASCO Secretariat for this meeting. The DG is made of volunteers who have agreed to be physically present in Vancouver. Size of the DG is limited and the group serves to prepare the next WG meeting.
b) The next WG meeting is scheduled to take place the week of
10 July 2017 in Geneva at the ISO Central Secretariat premises.