The first meeting of the Portable Document Format (PDF) Reference Committee will be held in Silver Spring, MD on July 16 and 17, 2007. The meeting location and agenda can be found on the AIIM web site using the above link. In addition, the same web page also contains a link to the draft of the document submitted to AIIM by Adobe.
The official name of the proposed standard is expected to be ISO 32000. The draft document submitted to AIIM by Adobe is 768 pages. The PDF Reference 1.7 is 1310 pages. According to Adobe the reduced number of pages is the result of using the ISO standard A4 paper size and removing some Adobe specific information.
The draft document also contains additional sections not found in the current PDF Reference and changes to sections that Adobe "considered incomplete".
The first page of the draft document is watermarked "FAST-TRACK PROCEDURE". The ISO fast track procedure is designed to ease the approval of existing standards that have been created by other standards bodies. Since neither the PDF Reference, nor the new draft document, have ever been formally recognized as a standard by any other standards body; I do not believe the fast track procedure should be applied in this case.
I have been sitting on standards committees for the past five years. The amount of time needed to develop the majority of standards is typically three to five years. The PDF/A standard is an anomaly in being adopted in just over two years. The PDF/A standard is 39 pages.