The Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS), taking the first step toward developing national IT standards, is inviting experts to join technical committees.

The committee members will be responsible for collection and analysis of information and for drafting relevant standards, according to Zacheus Mwatha, a manager at KEBS.

Given that KEBS is expected to vote on international standards, Mwatha says all committee members will be participating in international standardization work by attending international meetings, commenting and voting on international draft standards.

The call for nominations comes after what had generally been considered a successful multistakeholder discussion and subsequent abstention from the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO) vote on the Microsoft-backed OOXML.

KEBS will certify products that comply to the standards, though it cannot force companies to comply with the standards.

The standards to be developed are in the areas of telecommunications and information exchange, identification, IT security, cryptographic algorithms and data formats. The bureau will also be looking at standardization of data syntax, data structures, data encoding and technologies for the process of automatic identification and data capture.

However, the bureau has excluded standardization in the areas of automatic electronic identification for containers and container-related applications, identification of animals, transportation and control systems, cards and personal identification, financial transaction cards, related media, and operations and packaging of bar code labels.