Promoting the Repair Shop philosophy
March 30, 2008 9:01 pm StandardizationMarch 28th: Meeting in the Norwegian Standards Institute (Standard Norge).
Purpose: To decide the final vote for Norway on whether the document format OOXML should become an international standard.
The meeting: 27 people in the room, 4 of which were administrative staff from Standard Norge.
The outcome: Of the 24 members attending, 19 disapproved, 5 approved.
The result: The administrative staff decided that Norway wants to approve OOXML as an ISO standard.
Their justification: “Standard Norge puts emphasis on that if this [OOXML] becomes an ISO/IEC standard, it will be improved to better accommodate the users’ needs.”
This translates to: “Yes, we know the standard is broken, 79% of our technical committee have told us. But we hope that it someday will be repaired by someone. And we’ll be happy to help if someone can give us the resources.”
Alright, the Norwegian Standards Institute is moving away from adopting quality standards to promoting a repair shop philosophy.
Why?
Since the meeting in August where Norway was to determine its initial vote, the Deputy CÈO of Standard Norge has repeatedly been selling us, I mean telling us: “We like standards, we want to approve standards”. It’s been as though he was preparing us for this shock ever since we first convened.
But how can a standards organisation that promotes ISO 9000 and ISO 20000 (ITIL) approve such a broken standard? Do they not believe in Total Quality Management themselves? Are they not practicing what they preach? Oh no, that’s right they don’t even have a standard for how to approve standards.
And maybe, just maybe there is a motivation behind all this. If they approve a broken standard, they set up a repair shop. There is good money in repairing stuff. Especially an 8000 page standard in dire need of fixing.
With a sigh of disappointment, I see the once proud ship called Standard Norge taking in water because administrative staff started drilling for gold.
Update (2008-03-31 22:00): One person came late to the meeting, making it 24 members in the room, 20 against OOXML, 5 for, equaling an 80% disapproval rate.
March 31st, 2008 at 11:41
Wow!
This is very disappointing. Is there a good way to let Standards Norway know what their fellow citizens feel about this?
I work closely with Standards Norway on other standardization issues in the construction industry, and I am very happy with their work so far. They really do great work in this field, and I am very happy to try and support their work through my own organization.
Obviously the part of their organization that deals with document standards are not doing a good job. Are there hidden issues we don’t know about?
This just sounds crazy to me.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:31
Any sources for this accusations?
This just sounds like fiction to me.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:34
I am the source. I was there.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:42
How embarrassing for Standard Norge!
I can think of four explanations for their action:
1. Perhaps nobody at Standard Norge understands that 19 is a larger number than 5;
2. They could not understand the simple rules to be followed, which should have resulted in a FAIL, therefore they are incompetent;
3. They could not understand that the proposal might fail, therefore they are incompetent;
4. Corruption.
I hope they have a 5th explanation that an objective person would accept as truthful.
March 31st, 2008 at 13:04
Geir: Is there any sense in reporting them to the authorities? You know - Konkurransetilsynet and/or Økokrim? I mean, just simple persuation by you-know-who can’t be enough to explain this farce, can it?
March 31st, 2008 at 13:16
All possibilities are being explored, legally, politically and via public opinion such as this and other blogs and media.
March 31st, 2008 at 13:18
Are any of the members of the technical committee going to leave it, now that they have been shown that their input is completely irrelevant?
March 31st, 2008 at 13:20
I cannot speak for the other members, but I am considering if I should resign in protest or if it is better to stay and raise hell from inside.
March 31st, 2008 at 13:28
I think it would better to have you on the inside - Microsoft will go away eventually, certainly if the political will remains as strong as Heidi Grande Røys has expressed it.
http://www.digi.no/php/art.php?id=517267
March 31st, 2008 at 14:07
Kinda puts Jason Matusow’s optimism in perspective.
I was once sharing a house with a solo mother and her child - old friends -, and the child would come out with all sorts of interesting information about what the cat wanted, for example, when it was painfully obvious the cat wanted anything but … she was about seven at the time.
Perhaps you should ask Standard Norge to submit their birth certificates to prove they are not seven years of age? This behaviour sounds exactly like that seven-year-old girl’s.
March 31st, 2008 at 15:06
Respected Norway muscled into the mud by a monopolist! Do not let this stand.
March 31st, 2008 at 15:25
Steve, it is a variation of your number 2 which is the reason for the Norwegian vote.
Except, they did understand the simple rules to be followed, which left them with the final decision.
In the meeting where 19 disapproved, basically anyone could show up (they needed to register beforehand of course). Based on the input from the committee, Standard Norge (represented by three persons here referred to as administrative staff) were to take the final decision. The decision should be based on the arguments from the technical committee, but not the number of people advocating each argument.
It might well be that Open XML is a bad standard (I haven’t read the 8000 pages), but this blog entry gives a completely wrong picture of the standardization process.
March 31st, 2008 at 15:49
As for the technical arguments; Norway submitted 12 comments that had to be addressed by the BRM. Two were fully resolved, several were not solved or outright rejected, the rest were inadequately resolved. So, there would be no reason for Norway to change it’s vote from No to Yes.
March 31st, 2008 at 16:04
Perhaps they entered the results into Excel as text and then sorted them alphabetically. Voila! 5 is greater than 19.
March 31st, 2008 at 16:48
This is a disgrace. If it is solely up to the administrative staff, and they completely ignore the technical arguments that were put forth, then I would argue that the administrative staff’s decision was based on personal motive. Nothing else makes sense.
March 31st, 2008 at 17:24
It’s interesting to note that they also contradict their own press release from August 2007 [1] after they first voted “no, with comments”. They express something along the lines of “SN can change the vote to ‘yes’, if we consider our comments to have been considered/resolved”. *
All comments have obviously not been adressed properly - most aren’t even resolved! According to their press release, they couldn’t give a ‘yes’-vote.
I wrote about this [2] just before this meeting, and concluded that according to their 2007 press release, they had to vote ‘no’. I was obviously proven wrong - they changed the rules instead and made up a lame excuse to be able to give a ‘yes’-vote.
[1]: http://www.standard.no/imaker.exe?id=17235
[2]: http://www.int9.net/2008/03/hvorfor-standard-norge-ikke-ga.html
* Not totally certain about the translation here.
March 31st, 2008 at 18:13
[…] Geir Isene says the country sees a booming business in fixing “such a broken standard. The meeting: 27 […]
March 31st, 2008 at 18:15
Sadly, I thought the United States was the only nation where anything was legal as long as it turned a profit.
Thanks for reporting the truth.
March 31st, 2008 at 19:07
The outcome of this “standardisation” process is the product of classic “feel good” decision-making and consensus-building at its very finest, Norwegian-style!
What’s missing is all the “don’t be negative”, “we can make it better” and “don’t rock the boat” remarks from intellectually bankrupt bureaucrats/managers, which may never have come up in any meetings, but surely echoed around in various heads during the course of the proceedings. (Not that we’ll ever know, since the whole ISO brigade are a bit too obsessed with secrecy given that we’re dealing with public standards.)
And, of course, in various places we get a bunch of comments from either paid-up or ignorant commenters who merely echo the usual sentiments (”perhaps it’s in our best interests” or “if it’s good enough for Microsoft”) rather than actually reading up on the mess that the attempted legitimisation of this non-standard has involved.
The comments about the child and the cat are on the mark: the cat represents a large section of Norwegian bureaucrats and decision-makers; the child is just about anyone who’ll save the former group from actually having to form an opinion about anything, let alone stand up for it.
Geir (and colleagues), I’m sorry that your work clearly hasn’t been appreciated.
March 31st, 2008 at 19:20
[…] Noruega reinventa la democràcia gràcies a OOXMLblogs.freecode.no/isene/2008/03/30/promoting-the-repair-shop… per sometent fa pocs segons […]
March 31st, 2008 at 19:52
Everyone, please read GO’s comment:
“In the meeting where 19 disapproved, basically anyone could show up (they needed to register beforehand of course). Based on the input from the committee, Standard Norge (represented by three persons here referred to as administrative staff) were to take the final decision. The decision should be based on the arguments from the technical committee, but not the number of people advocating each argument.”
This is totally correct. Anyone who wanted could show up at this meetings. Standard Norge should not make a decision based on the votes in the commitee.
March 31st, 2008 at 20:03
[…] pero cierto. Lo cuenta Geir Isene, vía […]
April 1st, 2008 at 00:49
Please appeal.
This is a very bad precedent to IT standardization.
April 1st, 2008 at 02:48
Actually the cat represents - in my mind when I made that comment - the vast majority of individuals in the Standard Norge meeting who had no intention of accepting the proposed standard, and the child was the administrative staff who misrepresented them so badly.
April 1st, 2008 at 02:54
This is disgusting. I am a norwegian and I see this as a hard slap in the face to anyone that can count past 10.
April 1st, 2008 at 09:37
“personal motive” I very rarely heard a more friendly periphrasis for MONEY.
This whole thing smells like a pile of rotten fish from the beginning.
These redmond guys buy people like somebody else buys bread.
When i buy me a peace of bread in the morning and i pay for it, then there is no reason for me to celebrate my “success”. I simply payed for it.
April 1st, 2008 at 17:22
“Standard Norge should not make a decision based on the votes in the commitee.”
Perhaps not. After all, if the decision had been based on the number of form letters sent at Microsoft’s behest, it would have been a foregone conclusion. The issue is whether Standard Norge should listen to people with years of expertise in drafting real-world standards, or whether a happy feeling about a flawed, encumbered, rushed and yet sizeable specification should take precedence.
And yes, it would be interesting to know what it takes to give the decision-makers that “happy feeling”, especially since the stakes are rather high: if OOXML becomes a standard, Microsoft can argue that their poisonous formats are once again acceptable for public communication with the government.
Want to know how to do your taxes? It’s a Word document. Want to calculate your taxes? It’s an Excel spreadsheet. Sure, it may or may not be OOXML, but only the most ignorant or most vehement astroturfer would deny that in practice it will be more about the Microsoft legacy and applications than about standards.
April 1st, 2008 at 20:49
Fine!
This is the Real Significance of the Real Democracy! In Norwey you are away in the correct defense of the negocy, like many places around the world.
April 1st, 2008 at 23:20
[…] sem áður höfðu hafnað honum en skiptu um skoðun á síðustu stundu. Fréttir hafa borist af framgangi nefndarmanna í Noregi og segja þær meira en margt annað um hvaða vinnubrögð þar voru við höfð. Meira um það […]
April 2nd, 2008 at 05:48
[…] Criticisms: Groklaw, Groklaw, Geir Isene […]
April 2nd, 2008 at 20:11
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April 4th, 2008 at 09:23
The explanation from Norway essentially breaks down into…
since there were more yes answers in the august hearing we can’t really listen to the march meeting.
Problem with the argument is that there are very little ground for making the poll equal with technical commitee.
It is disingenious to assume that the people answering in August had the full information about the number of errors in OOXML. There are even less reason to believe that they could anticipate a BRM that must use a paper ballot since they did not have time to discuss the solutions proposed.
It is an open question if the people answering in august would still stick to the same oppinion now. The reason why this is the case is that it is unknown if these has kept themself updated about the truth about OOXML. If standard Norway really wanted to use the hearing method to decide things they should have done a new hearing with the evaluation from the march meeting included to the people voting. Limiting correct information is the key for how Microsoft managed to trick the world to accept OOXML.