NormEs was a research project funded by the German government. The goal was to create a process for collaborative development of norms and standards.

Development time 2012-2014
Development duration 1.5 Years
Technologies Javascript, Sharepoint
License Closed source
Team size 2 developers

To demonstrate the process, a web-based collaborative document editor was developed that implements the voting process for German norm documents.

From December 2012 to May 2014, I was working as a research assistant at the Institute for Management Cybernetics in Aachen. My main task was the frontend development of the NormEs implementation.

NormEs dashboard
The dashboard of the developed platform.

The goal of NormEs was to make the development of norms and standards easier. The project was done in cooperation with the German Commission for Electrical, Electronic & Information Technologies, which is a joint commission of the DIN institute and the VDE association.

Today, most standardization panels still work on paper. Meetings are held in person, where the norm text drafts are discussed. Requests for changes are submitted in paper form. In regular intervals, voting rounds for the change requests are held. The NormEs software implements this procedure in a web-based platform. Users can edit the norm text drafts and submit change requests. Before voting for the changes, users can review the patches and discuss them:

NormEs patch view
Patches are displayed in the document. Their changes can be switched on or off.

On the technical side, the platform features a WYSIWYG document editor that calculates diffs for the text and submits the changes to the server. The platform is based on Microsoft SharePoint.

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