This page gives a bit of history of the IXAS Standards & Criteria efforts and its evolution into the Q2XAFS series of meetings.
In the Proceedings of the XAFS V Conference (which took place in Seattle, USA, August 1988), published in Physica B 159, 1989, there is an appendix titled Report of the International Workshop on Standards and Criteria in X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy, edited by F.W. Lytle, D.E. Sayers, and E.A. Stern. The workshop took place in March 1988 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. In addition to the three editors, workshop attendees included several pioneers in the field: Antonio Bianconi, Chuck Bouldin, Bruce Bunker, Grant Bunker, Tony Cox, Daryl Crozier, Steve Cramer, Tim Elam, Alain Fontaine, Jose Goulon, Steve Gurman, Samar Hasnain, Steve Heald, Britt Hedman, Keith Hodgson, Diek Koningsberger, Pierre Lagarde, Kunquan Lu, Yanjun Ma, Tim Morrison, Hiroyuki Oyanagi, John Rehr, Grayson Via, and Geoff Woolery. Though the descriptions of experiments, data analysis, theory, and databases may seen somewhat primitive 35 years later, this was one of the first efforts to organize and establish best practices for X-ray absorption spectroscopy.
As developments in XAFS continued, more work on standardization of methodologies was needed. As the first International XAFS Society (later to become the International X-ray Absorption Society) was formed under the leadership of Dale Sayers, a series of small meetings were held in 1997 (Seattle), 1998 (Chicago, as part of the XAFS X conference), 1999 (Paris, at the LURE facility), and 2000 (at SPring8, as part of the XAFS XI conference). These meetings had variable people in attendance, but included Dale Sayers, Ed Stern, Kiyotaka Asakura, Chuck Bouldin, Bruce Bunker, Grant Bunker, Julie Cross, Emannuel Curis, Andy Dent, Andrea DiCicco, Daryl Crozier, Adriano Filpponni, Graham George, Steve Heald, Alain Michaelowicz, Matthew Newville, Hiroyuki Oyanagi, James Penner-Hahn, Robert Pettifer, Bruce Ravel, John Rehr, Andrei Rogalev (and probably several more: please update!).
These workshops included lively, sometimes contentious discussions of data analysis, error analysis, and the statistical treatment of data. The efforts culminated in an extended Report of the International XAFS Society Standards and Criteria Committee, D.E. Sayers, Chair, 2000. This report was intended to update the 1989 report and formalize recommendations on data collection, data analysis methods, the statistical treatment of XAFS data. The report also made recommendations about reporting of XAFS data and listed many web resources available at the time of its writing.
Activity slowed until the first Q2XAFS meeting: Q2XAFS 2011. organized by Hiroyuki Oyanag, and published in J. Synchrotron Rad. (2012). 19, 849-850