Geir Isene : Straight talk on IT

Sorting to untruth to justify a bad decision

On the OOXML standardization process in Standard Norge (SN; the Norwegian Standards Institute):

2007-08-22: Ivar Jachwitz (Deputy General Manager of SN):

“This will be a process based on consensus to determine the standard on its technical merits. There will be no voting, so no, the 37 form letters initiated by Microsoft supporting OOXM will not count.”

Source: Me, I was at the meeting.

2008-04-01: After Mr. Jachwitz overturned his technical committee and decided to vote “Yes” to OOXML on behalf of Norway:

“We had an initial vote back in 2007 of nearly 50 people and the vast majority were in favor,” Jachwitz said. He did acknowledge that 21 members of the group last week submitted a letter asking for Norway to oppose Ooxml. “Our vote reflected the majority opinion,” Jachwitz said. “I do not see that it was improper.”

Source: The International Herald Tribune

He is now counting votes all of a sudden - and the 37 form letters are the basis for his justification to change Norway’s vote to “Yes”. Sorting to untruth to justify an irregular decision only adds to the irregularity.

The EU commission has already inquired about possible irregularities in the Norwegian process. This too will be reported.

OOXML->ISO: From What to Who

What?

The Norwegian Standards Institute (Standard Norge) steamrolled its own technically committee and voted Yes to OOXML on behalf of Norway. As much as 80% of the committee was against Norway changing its previous vote of “No, with comments” to “Yes”. The reason being that more than 80% of Norway’s technical comments were not handled satisfactory in the Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva in February. The man responsible for the steamrolling is the Deputy General Manager of Standard Norge, Mr. Ivar Jachwitz.

Who?

Ivar Jachwiz is also on the board of the ISO TMB/SMB (International Organisation for Standardization’s Technical Management Board/Standardization Management Board). Mr. Jachwitz has his share of defending to do against allegations of irregularities in the Norwegian process. He even reported in February to the EU commission that there had been no irregularities or criticism of the Norwegian process. Those who have read my blog post after the meeting in August last year know this to be untrue. He will undoubtedly keep on defending right into the ISO TMB/SMB. Here is why:

The part of ISO responsible for handling the OOXML case is the JTC1 (The Joint Technical Committee #1 for ISO and the IEC [International Electrotechnical Commission]). A decision on the OOXML by the National Bodies (NBs) may be appealed within two months. And I am sure we will see an appeal if the result is an approval of the standard.

The JTC1 rules specifies in part:

11.3.2 The documented appeal shall, in all cases, be submitted to the Secretaries-General, with a copy to the JTC 1 Chairman and Secretariat.

11.3.3 The Secretaries-General shall, following whatever consultations they deem appropriate, refer the appeal together with their comments to the TMB/SMB within one month after receipt of the appeal.

11.3.4 The TMB/SMB shall decide whether an appeal shall be further processed or not. If the decision is in favour of proceeding, the Chairmen of the TMB/SMB shall form a conciliation panel (see 9.2). The conciliation panel shall hear the appeal and attempt to resolve the difference of opinion as soon as practicable. If the conciliation panel is unsuccessful in its endeavours, it shall so report within three months to the Secretaries-General, giving its recommendations on how the matter should be settled.

11.3.5 The Secretaries-General, on receipt of the report of the conciliation panel, shall inform the TMB/SMB, which will make their decision.

The very person responsible for the unilateral decision by the administrative staff of Standard Norge will be on the board of appeal in ISO. Watch the news. This will be interesting.

Norwegian committee chairman to ISO: Count our vote as No

This was just sent to ISO from the chairman of the Norwegian standards committee responsible for evaluating OOXML:

Formal protest regarding the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500

I am writing to you in my capacity as Chairman (of 13 years standing) of the Norwegian mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. I wish to inform you of serious irregularities in connection with the Norwegian vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (Office Open XML) and to lodge a formal protest.

You will have been notified that Norway voted to approve OOXML in this ballot. This decision does not reflect the view of the vast majority of the Norwegian committee, 80% of which was against changing Norway’s vote from No with comments to Yes.

Because of this irregularity, a call has been made for an investigation by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry with a view to changing the vote.

I hereby request that the Norwegian decision be suspended pending the results of this investigation.

Yours sincerely,

Steve Pepper
Chairman, SN/K185 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 mirror committee)

(sign.)

The Letter to ISO in pdf

Promoting the Repair Shop philosophy

March 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.

Flooding JTC1/SC34: A mixed blessing

Last wednesday, there was a new meeting in Standard Norge Committee 185, the ISO /IEC JTC1 SC34 mirror committee (the sub committee where OOXML resorts). Interesting data emerged.

According to Steve Pepper’s presentation, there were only 9 Participating Members in SC34 November last year. Since then, another 29 members have joined. Bear in mind that this sub committee has enjoyed a quiet, rather anonymous life until the bomb shell called OOXML was dropped in its lap late last year. Membership fluctuations have been few and far between. All of a sudden, countries like Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon showed an immediate interest in the sub committee’s technical matters.

Few had registered that it wasn’t necessary to participate in SC34 in order to vote on the fate of OOXML as an ISO standard. The voting countries where the P-Members of its mother, the JTC1. Countries flooded the SC34 to no avail.

Actually, it may prove to be a curse to SC34.

You see, in order to get much done in the sub committee, at least 50% of its P-Members needs to participate in a voting. Even with as much as 20% of the newcomers being interested in more than helping out Microsoft, it leaves less than 40% of the members caring enough to cast a vote. This will slow the the work to a grinding halt. SC34 will be left dead in the waters.

Am I exaggerating? I think not. The first example already proves my point; The letter ballot of 2007-09-03 failed as only 24% cared to vote (the link shows that Norway didn’t vote, but in fact we did). The only voting countries were the P-members from back then - the 9 pre-OOXML member countries. Not one of the newcomers responded.

It may have seemed like a blessing to get all this attention with lots of new committee members. Now it looks like the opposite.

I wonder if Microsoft cares about the consequences of their ISO stuffing. I hope the troubles in SC34 jumpes up and bites the monopoly in its big behind.

Update: An Open Letter to ISO

As announced, here is the revision going by snail-mail to ISO:
An Open Letter to ISO (pdf)

The changes are small but significant. Here are two of the paragraphs that benefitted from valuable input:

I urge ISO to adopt a policy that a country may not become a P-member before it has a proven interest as an O-member in that technical committee’s work. The country should have attended a certain number of TC meetings. To maintain its P-membership status, the country must also maintain a minimum of activity – meeting attendance and voting.

It may be time also to reevaluate the one country one vote principle. In ISO, the Chinese vote carries the same weight as that of Cyprus. In the JTC1/SC34 the late-comers includes Trinidad and Tobago, Côte-d’Ivoire, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Lebanon and Malta. Countries could be grouped into three categories based on population size. A vote from a category three country would carry the same weight as three countries from category one.

Again, thanks for the suggestions.

Thanks for the input (Open Letter to ISO)

Based on the input to my Open Letter to ISO, I am about to revise it and send it to the ISO officials (by snail mail).

Thanks to the people who left comments on my blog post.
Thanks to the people at Ars Technica.
Thanks to Slashdot. Sorry for not fixing the feature to comment my blog post until several hours after this was slashdot’ed.
Thanks to Norbert Bollow at OpenISO.org.
Thanks to all the bloggers who commented on this, and to all the people who filled my inbox with good suggestions.

The final letter will be posted here. Add this blog as an rss feed, and you will see it as it is posted.

An Open Letter to ISO

Is it time to standardize ISO?

In light of the recent events relating to the standardization process of EOOXML, it seems appropriate to look into possible standardization of the process itself.

The DIS 29500 (EOOXML) process has revealed several shortcomings, both on the national level and on the level of ISO.

The organisations representing each country have very different procedures for determining the nation’s vote in ISO. Some countries will vote only if their technical committee is unanimous on the issue. Others will reach consensus defined by a 3/4 majority vote or even 2/3 majority. In some countries there is no vote and the technical committee is only advisory to the national standards organisation. Others yet have a two-stage process where the nations vote is determined through two committees. In short there is no standard for accepting a standard.

It seems ISO is not prepared for a politicized process where a big and influential commercial enterprise will use any means possible to push its own standard through to certification.

Committees are flooded by the vendor in support of the standard. Votes are bought and results are hijacked. Several national bodies have flawed and skewed procedures open for corruption.

The list is much longer, but a few examples should suffice:

Norway - originally a process decided by unanimity but altered on the fly
Sweden - voting seats bought and the result thus hijacked
Switzerland - process rigged in favor of the vendor, the chairman excluded the option of voting “reject” or “reject, with comments”
Portugal - process skewed by blaming on lack of available chairs
Malaysia - two committees voted unanimously “rejection with comments” and mysteriously overturned by the government to “abstain”

Even if this is the tip of an ice berg, the examples should warrant a thorough examination of the national processes.

The fact that ISO enforces no standard for national bodies opens the standardization process for manipulation or corruption. I strongly urge ISO to adopt a strict policy for its members detailing the rules for how a national body shall determine its vote in ISO and that it enforces such policy vigorously.

On the level of ISO, criticism has been raised against the fast track process. An investigation should be called to see if EOOXML was unduly put on the ISO Fast Track.

During the Fast Track, many new countries have joined as P-Members (Participating members) in the technical committee, the JTC1. Several of the countries have no credible track on standardization work, have joined very late in the process only to vote an unconditional “Yes” to a standard that has obvious room for improvement. It may be purely coincidental that the countries that came late in the process score much lower on the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International. It is possible to corrupt the process by pressuring countries to join a process and vote without sufficient knowledge. I urge ISO to adopt a policy that P-members may not be accepted later than 3 months before the committee is to vote.

It may be time also to reevaluate the one country one vote principle. In ISO, the Chinese vote carries the same weight as that of Cyprus. In the JTC1/SC34 the late-comers includes Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Côte-d’Ivoire, Cyprus, Lebanon and Malta.

As for approving standards within the field of IT, ISO would greatly benefit from adopting the IETF requirment of two independent reference implementations for passing a standard. This should increase the quality of ISO’s IT standards.

The strength, integrity and scalability of ISO have been tested. The organizations agility and adaptability will now be measured. May ISO move quickly to fix its own PR and more importantly its own standardization process.

The publicity that ISO has been given through the DIS 29500 process is phenomenal. ISO and standardization in general has reached a peak in public awareness. I hope the organization will use this publicity to show strong integrity and potential.

The intent of this letter is to safeguard future standardization and to ensure that the processes scale in the face of increased pressure from large commercial interests.

Geir Isene
CEO FreeCode International

MS: Master of Spin

A quick exercise:

1. Read the official ISO press release on the resulting OOXML vote.
2. Read the official Microsoft press release on the same.
3. Read this explanation on the word “spin”.
4. Read this article on Wikipedia.
5. Make up your own mind.

OOXML shot down (for now)

Despite manipulation and corruption of the process, Microsoft has suffered a serious blow in the standardization of OOXML.

Millions and millions of dollars have been poured into the project, yet Microsoft failed to get its file format accepted as an ISO standard.

Out of the 41 Participant Members of the ISO technical committee, only 53% voted in favor of the proposal, 14% short of the required level for acceptance.

This goes to show that despite a weak and corruptible ISO process, cards were called and the flawed standard was halted. So far, so good.

But the process continues. Most likely until Microsoft gets its file format standardized. The Ballot Resolution Meeting in February 2008 will bring up all the comments and look at ways to resolve them. The software vendor will have its todo list and may commence fixing the shortcomings.

Nevertheless, we have our breather. And Goliath was left stunned. A quick hurray and back to being a busy bee.