Before the Shelf

A standard nobody adopts is not a standard. It is a document on a shelf. The work that determines whether a standard becomes infrastructure happens before it is published, not after.

International standards are how global trade actually works. The barcode that lets a retailer in Amsterdam scan a strawberry from Mexico, the conformity assessment that lets a Filipino sugar producer demonstrate compliance with European deforestation regulation, the digital traceability protocol that lets a Colombian coffee cooperative protect proprietary geography while still meeting EU due-diligence requirements, all of these are downstream of standards work that took years to develop and depends on stakeholders agreeing on shared rules. When standards work, they are nearly invisible. When they fail, they fail expensively.

The traditional model has known limits. Standards development can take many years from initial proposal to publication. Smaller economies have a structural disadvantage in shaping standards that disproportionately affect them. And even excellent standards can languish for years between publication and meaningful adoption, particularly in the developing economies whose trade access depends most on them. The result is a body of well-intentioned international standards that does not reach the operational layer fast enough to matter.

On June 24, 2025, a workshop at the WTO headquarters in Geneva brought together senior trade officials, policymakers, standards body leadership, and industry practitioners around a different model. The workshop was convened by COSSAF, the Collaboratory for Open Software and Systems in Ag and Food, a non-profit working on collaborative approaches to supply chain traceability standards. TOTEM provided the facilitation, alongside an exceptional team of standards professionals representing ASTM International, GS1, UN/CEFACT, and others. What emerged is the subject of this case study.

The pre-standardization frame

The conventional sequence of standards development moves in one direction. A working group drafts a standard. Stakeholders are consulted on the draft. The draft goes through public comment. The standard is finalized and published. Adoption is then promoted, supported, and measured. Stakeholders enter the process at the consultation stage, which means by the time they are positioned to identify implementation barriers, the architecture of the standard has largely been decided. The barriers they surface get addressed in the next revision cycle, several years later, by which point the underlying technology and operating environment have moved on.

The pre-standardization frame inverts the sequence. Stakeholders are brought into the design phase itself, before the architecture is set. Implementation requirements, cultural contexts, regional regulatory differences, and practical operating constraints are incorporated from the beginning rather than discovered later. The methodology applies human-centric design principles, which originated in product development, to a standards-development context. The argument is structural. Standards built with the people who will implement them are more likely to be implementable. This is not a controversial idea. It is just not how international standards work has historically been organized.

What the room produced

The workshop ran across several distinct sessions, each anchored to a real-world demonstration of how pre-standardization collaboration is already producing results in practice. The pattern across the sessions matters more than any single one.

The validation from the WTO itself

Erik Wijkström, Head of the WTO's Technical Barriers to Trade Unit, participated directly in the workshop, exploring how collaborative approaches can address infrastructure challenges that many countries face in demonstrating compliance with standards. With nearly a third of TBT trade concerns relating to environmental protection, the timing for collaborative traceability standards is consequential. The WTO's engagement signals that the institution responsible for managing technical barriers to trade sees the collaborative model as compatible with, and potentially accelerating, its core function.

A case from ASTM D8558 in practice

Mike Coner of Blockticity walked the room through a Philippine sugar distributor preparing for the European Union Deforestation Regulation. By using blockchain-verified certificates of authenticity aligned with ASTM D8558, the company secured a 20 percent price premium for organic sugar while building the verification capability that EUDR compliance will require. The case is operationally specific. It demonstrates how a single conformity-assessment standard can serve any product moving through global supply chains, reducing legal risk and trade friction simultaneously. It is not a hypothetical. It is the standard working in production.

Smart Data Escrow as open infrastructure

Jaco Voorspuij of FixLog Consulting introduced Smart Data Escrow as the open-source complement to commercial blockchain platforms, an architecture for selective data sharing that keeps sensitive information behind organizational firewalls while still enabling verification and transparency. The framing TOTEM has been advancing through the SADIE program, sharing data with anyone without sharing it with everyone, found a natural home in this conversation. The Colombian Coffee Federation example illustrated the principle at scale: 540,000 coffee growers preparing to demonstrate EUDR compliance while protecting proprietary geographic and business data through selective permissions. Whether through commercial platforms or open-source tools, the goal is the same. The choice between them is a choice about cost, control, and accessibility, not a choice about whether the underlying capability exists.

The standards bodies harmonizing rather than competing

Jeff Grove from ASTM International described the existing collaboration architecture in concrete terms: 127 memorandums of understanding with national, regional, and international standards bodies. The relationship between ASTM, GS1, and UN/CEFACT is not a parallel-track effort but an active harmonization, with each organization contributing its particular strengths. This is the operational answer to a question that often goes unasked, whether multiple international standards bodies can cooperate at the level of building shared infrastructure rather than competing for adoption. The answer being demonstrated in real time is yes.

The practitioner principle

Across the sessions, a phrase recurred in different forms from different speakers. Build the system with the people who depend on it. Develop the standard with the people who will implement it. Design the protocol with the practitioners who will operate against it on a Tuesday afternoon. Whatever the wording, the underlying principle was consistent. Standards that work in operational environments are standards developed with operators in the room from the first session. Everything that makes pre-standardization collaboration distinct from conventional standards development follows from that single commitment.

Why the methodology travels

The pre-standardization frame is portable in a way that conventional standards development is not. The methodology rests on three commitments, each operable across substantive domains.

First, integrate stakeholders early. Bring industry, regulatory, and academic participants into the design phase rather than the review phase. This single change addresses the structural source of most adoption failures.

Second, treat each collaboration cycle as an input to the next. The innovation flywheel approach generates insights from each engagement that improve the design of subsequent engagements. What worked in a packaging context informs the design of a retail engagement. What surfaced in a sustainability working session informs the next standards working group. The methodology gets better with use.

Third, balance global harmonization with local viability. Human-centric design ensures that standards work in the diverse cultural, economic, and technological contexts they will actually face, while still preserving the harmonization that makes global trade work. This is the holding multiple geometries principle applied to international policy work. A standard that works only in one operational context is not an international standard.

What came next

The Geneva workshop was the visible event. The work continued across the summer of 2025 through a complimentary workshop series open to standards professionals, policymakers, and industry leaders globally. Three two-hour modules covered stakeholder mapping and engagement design, human-centric standards workshop facilitation, and implementation readiness planning. The series ran across multiple time zones to support genuine global participation, not just symbolic inclusion.

Beyond the workshop series, the pre-standardization methodology is now integrated into active standards work happening across COSSAF's partnerships. The Supply Chain of the Future initiative continues to grow, with engagement from hundreds of participants across dozens of countries on every continent now contributing to technical working groups and collaborative efforts to improve supply chain infrastructure. The ASTM F49 committee continues to advance traceability standards work with practitioners alongside the formal voting body. The collaboration between ASTM, GS1, and UN/CEFACT continues to deepen.

The pattern transfers beyond traceability. Any standards-development context where adoption has historically lagged publication, where smaller economies have been structurally underrepresented, where the standards work has happened far from the operating environments the standards must serve, is a candidate for the pre-standardization frame. The substantive subject changes. The shape of the engagement does not.