What does OIW stand for There seem to be many OID's that have been put in the ASN.1 tree that have the following ISO identified organization: OIW.

One example is SHA-1 (ElGamal seems to be another):

id-SHA1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::=
       {iso(1) identified-organization(3) oiw(14) secsig(3)
        algorithms(2) 26 }


Can anybody explain what this organization entailed? It seems to have been an OSI workshop where NIST participated with other organizations to set up standards. But there is precious little information to find on the internet.

The SHA-1 standard lists it as the "NIST / OSI Implementors' Workshop". But that seems to be little reason for it to specify SHA-1 in itself.
I'll port the contents of the link of Henrick:


  Within the United States, one key forum for profile collaboration is the Open
  Systems Environment Implementors Workshop (OIW), which is hosted by NIST. OIW
  recently expanded its domain of concerns from communications to the full range
  of Open System Environment issues (interoperability, portability, and consistency of user interfaces, parallel to the IEEE 1003.0 Guide), although no  II specific projects have been defined for OIW yet. OIW is the regional workshop for the Americas, collaborating with parallel bodies in Asia (AOW) and in Europe (EWOS). Together these groups have the authority to forward documents for approval by JTC1 as "International Standardized Profiles," which reflects the ideal status for information infrastructure specification: a coherent suite of well-defined standards adopted by the international standards community.


Not very helpful in itself, but this is the most concise meaning so far (it doesn't make it clear what it actually does or who it consists of at all though).