General Overview of VITA Operations

Standards Development

Member companies of the VITA Standards Organization (VSO) send representatives to "virtual" working group meetings held every week or two, as well as regular Face to Face VSO meetings held every other month around the United States. Working groups cooperatively develop new open standards for use in the embedded systems marketplace. Membership in VITA is by company or organization only. Employees of member companies can register for a login profile associated with an active company membership. This site has resources where you can read a bit more about VITA. Members can also access the VITA Policies and Procedures, VITA Bylaws and other organization documents to more fully understand the details of how VITA operates.

VITA WebSites

VITA has two websites.  The first is our main membership site at www.vita.com where members can log in and download any published VITA standards for free, read the updated status of active working groups, and research other member companies. Employees of member companies who register for a user profile will automatically receive a login for this site.

VITA also has a second site, workspace.vita.com where all the new standards development work takes place.  If an employee of a member company indicates in their application they want to "actively participate" in standards development, they will also receive a login to Workspace.

If you find errors in either web site, or in a a potential error or ambiguous section in a published standard, please contact executive.director@vita.com with your concerns.

Regular Working Group Meetings

Members can register as participants in active working groups in Workspace.  We hold regularly scheduled working group development sessions as listed in our Workspace Conference Call calendar.  You must have a profile in Workspace and be logged in to access the calendar and working group pages. VITA has a rigorous patent disclosure process that is followed during all working group meetings.

Regular VSO Face to Face Meetings

The VSO meets in person six times a year, starting in January and meeting every other month.  These two day meetings follow a standard agenda where the first two hours are considered the plenary business portion of the meeting.  Attendance during this portion of VSO meetings is used to grant voting rights for VSO related ballots.  Members must have attended two of the past four VSO meetings in order to cast a vote.  During the plenary session, the Executive Director gives a short report on the organization, followed by the Technical Director reviewing meeting rules, provide an overview of the standards development process and provide the status of any in-process ballots regarding standards.  The chairman of each active working group then  provides a short 5 minute status update of the progress made since the last VSO meeting.  Any roadblocks are identified and options discussed. Following the plenary session, various working groups hold sequential working sessions. Day 2 is a continuation of working group sessions. 

How members pay one of multiple invoices

On occasions, members may have multiple invoiced open for payment.  For example, a bundle administrator may have the annual dues invoice open in their account pending payment and they register to attend a VSO Face to Face meeting which creates another invoice for the meeting fee.  Here is a process where the member can select which open invoices they wish to pay online using their credit card.

1. Log into your www.vita.com account.
2. Click on “View Profile” under your name at the top right of the home screen.
   
3. Click on the “Invoices and payments” item in the green menu.
4. Deselect the any invoice(s) you do not want to pay online using your credit card.
• (In other words, make sure only the invoices you want to pay are selected)
  
5. Click on the green ”Pay Online” button just above the list of invoices.
   
6. Process your credit card in the secure portal to pay the total of all selected invoices

If you have additional questions, please send them to executive.director@vita.com