On October 24, 2016, a team from the GW Environmental and Energy Management Institute (EEMI) participated in the first NIST-ANSI Standards Negotiation Competition. The EEMI team, comprised of Professor Joe Cascio and three students, Seth Barna, Melis Gursel and Abdul Moiz Sohail, competed against teams from the University of Maryland, Purdue University and the City College of New York. The teams competed in a simulated exercise to create an international standard related to industrial communication systems that allow machines and operators to gather and exchange data to support manufacturing operations.
The competition introduced participants to the complexity and subtleties involved in standards determination, strategy and negotiation. A typical international standard usually takes three to five years to develop. The four teams working and competing with each other had four hours to accomplish the feat.
The three GW students are currently enrolled in Professor Cascio’s course, EMSE 6992-11: Beyond Compliance: Next Generation Environmental Self-Governance, which features international voluntary consensus standards. This competition was an excellent opportunity for the students to experience the process by which such standards are developed and was considered a great success even though the GW team was not the winner.
Shown here, Melis, Seth and Moiz huddle in deep discussion with the other competitors.
