33 / 234
LINKING PEOPLE, JOINING NATIONS
quick to refute these suggestions as he had been working hard to address such issues in the
short time he had been the IIW Standardisation Officer. He had also gone to great lengths,
along with Bramat, to improve the situation through a meeting with ISO held in Geneva
six weeks earlier.
21
The implications arising from the strength of Hicks’ response were to
involve considerable discussion between members of the Board of Directors and, as a result,
Ziegenfuss eventually replaced Hicks when Hicks retired from this position at the end of
1998. Braithwaite commented on this change, stating it ‘…was a very positive move since
nobody knew more about standards and their difficulties than Dr Ziegenfuss’.
22
Ziegenfuss
was to have a productive meeting with Hicks and was confident that the transition between
the two would go very well.
Ziegenfuss was a details man and brought about many
procedural changes that improved relationships with ISO and
other standards authorities. Importantly, he was able to work
closely with all the respective IIW Working Units by providing
a conduit through which emerging standards could see the light
of day. He was the first non-European observer to any CEN
committee in the late 1980s, as an ISO/TC 44
Welding and Allied
Processes
representative, and his views were often solicited during
meetings. He had a high regard for Mr Birger Hanson (Denmark),
who was Chair of CEN/TC 121 for an unprecedented five
three-year terms from the late 1980s to the early 2000s.
Ziegenfuss recollected that Hanson was an excellent
chair during times of raucous and heated debate in the
committee over many of the mandated standards being
developed in Europe.
23
The work of the IIW Standardisation Officer and the Secretariat was to
bring rewards from other quarters when it culminated in an agreement with
ISO in June 2001 for a payment of CHF 1 000 for each standard prepared by
IIW and published to date by ISO. This was a move that added to financial
stability in a year where the possibility of expense on the qualification and
certification scheme was coming under consideration.
One other important change in IIW operations took place in 2001 when the General
Assembly, held at Ljubljana, Slovenia, was informed that this was the last time that two
General Assembly meetings would be held during each IIWAnnual Assembly, thus putting
an end to an era lasting since 1948.
24
In the context of the structural reorganisation of IIW, a
Technical Management Board (TMB) was set up in 2002 to replace the Technical Committee
with added responsibility for the general policy and objectives of all IIW’s scientific and
technical activities and their role in producing standards. Initially, the TMB consisted
of 11 members with Prof. Dr-Ing. Ulrich Dilthey (Germany) as Chair. Also, within the
Jan Pilarczyk