Open XML Negatively Impacting ISO Standards Body

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

October 17, 2007, 3:08 PM

Since the number of "principal" or "participating" (P-class) voting members of the International Organization for Standardization's JTC 1 SC 34 working group increased by eleven prior to last month's preliminary ballot on the approval process for Microsoft's Office Open XML format suite, participation by nearly all members on important matters other than OOXML appears to be waning.

Of the three non-OOXML ballots that were voted on since September 2, ISO documents reveal, Poland was the only new member to vote yea or nay, while Colombia voted twice to abstain, and all other new members failed to cast ballots at all.

That lack of voting is detrimental to the ISO process, because under its rules, a measure that fails to acquire 50% or greater response from its P-class voters automatically fails.

A total of 24 countries failed to participate in a vote last October 7 in a critical vote on a regular grammar-based schema definition language for XML, called RELAX NG. In that vote, not a single participating country voted negatively, with the US, the UK, and new member Poland among the seven "Yes" votes, Japan alone voting "Yes, with comments," and four other countries abstaining.

But under ISO rules, the measure went down to defeat for lack of participation.

That same day, a similar measure regarding further development of another XML schema, Namespace-based Validation Dispatching Language (already an ISO standard), also went down to defeat with a very similar tally. And a measure to create an official liaison with the XML Guild went down to defeat the same day, although there was one nay vote cast from the Netherlands.

As JTC 1 SC 34's Secretariat-Manager Ken Holman informed members last September 30 at the time a dearth of responses were being collected for pending ballots, in a memo cited by ConsortiumInfo.org, "Since the recent influx of new P-members to SC 34, not a single ballot has been able to be processed...It is critically important that P-members remember their obligations: if we do not get 20 responses per ballot, the work of SC 34 will grind to a halt....If you do not plan to participate in the work of SC 34, please consider changing your membership to Observer status."

One ballot agenda's lack of participation may not yet a crisis make, although some are suggesting it may be time to light a fire underneath the freshmen members' respective P-classes.

As Linux Foundation board member and attorney Andrew Updegrove commented this morning, "The situation underlines the vulnerability of the traditional standard setting process to those that wish to manipulate the rules. Those rules are based on the assumption that participants are acting in good faith. They are also biased towards making participation easy, in order to allow everyone affected by standards to have a voice in their creation. As standards become ever more important to vendors as well as to the rest of the world, it appears that those rules will need to be overhauled."