I have now created a very extensive, indexed BRM Resource Page to hold the many links, press releases, delegate statements and other material that were originally found here. You can find that extra materials here.
A rather incredible week in Geneva has just ended, bringing to a close the Herculean task assumed by the over 100 delegates from 32 countries that attended the BRM. That challenge, of course, was how to productively resolve the more than 1,100 comments (after elimination of duplicates) registered by the 87 National Bodies that voted last summer with respect to a specification that itself exceeded 6,000 pages.
I have spent the week in Geneva, and have spoken with many delegates from many delegations on a daily basis. Each believed that a body that purports to issue "global open standards" should not impose an obligation of secrecy on how the standards that people must live with are approved on their behalf. It would be fair to say that, notwithstanding all of the charges and counter charges that have been made leading up to the BRM regarding how National Body votes were taken last summer, how delegations have been selected, and how they have been instructed to act and vote at the BRM, there has been a good faith effort by all to try to achieve a successful result. The same appears to have held true within delegations, even those that contained representatives of the most opposed parties.
There are two ways in which you may hear the results of the BRM summarized by those that issue statements and press releases in the days to come. Perhaps inevitably, they are diametrically opposed, as has so often happened in the ODF - OOXML saga to date. Those results are as follows:
98.4% of the OOXML Proposed Dispositions were approved by a three to two majority at the BRM, validating OOXML
The OOXML Proposed Dispositions were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the "Fast Track" process
[Paragraph updated] In this blog entry, I will explain why the following is the best characterization, and help you read the various press releases and statements that may be made with the benefit of the appropriate context:
Only a very small percentage of the proposed dispositions were discussed in detail, amended and approved by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the "Fast Track" process
It did not take long for the delegates to conclude that it would be impossible to discuss and resolve all of the proposed dispositions, notwithstanding efforts to streamline the process. After several days, only about 20 to 30 dispositions had been thoroughly discussed and voted upon [updated: the Edited Meeting Notes appear to indicate that a total of 63 resolutions were discussed and individually voted upon]. Approximately 200 dispositions [Updated: the Edited Meeting Notes indicate that the actual number was 126] in the nature of minor editorial corrections (misplaced commas and the like) were also adopted. Discussion increasingly turned as a result to seeking ways to streamline the process in order to reach a conclusion within the five days allowed. Those efforts included instructing interested delegates to go off-line to discuss a resolution and come back with proposed compromise language. However, these efforts proved insufficient to do more than nibble away at the huge number of dispositions remaining.
Acknowledging the impossibility of achieving the stated goal of a BRM (e.g, to carefully review each proposed disposition and reach consensus on an appropriate resolution), a proposal was made on Wednesday to approve all proposed resolutions in a single vote before the end of the BRM, thus nominally "resolving" each remaining proposed disposition without any discussion at all. It was agreed that this was the only available option, and a written ballot with all of the c. 900 proposed dispositions that had never been discussed was accordingly issued on Thursday. Each National Body delegation was requested to complete the ballot and return it on Friday. The alternatives offered were as follows:
1. Indicate "adopt," "disapprove" or "abstain" after each proposed disposition.
2. Indicate such a vote on as many proposed dispositions as desired (or none), and vote "accept," "reject" or "abstain" on all of the rest.
It is significant to note that voting to accept all dispositions that were not discussed is a less obvious choice than might be assumed. In fact, few if any of the dispositions that were individually discussed and voted upon during the week were adopted without change. In other words, adopting a proposed resolution without discussion could result in making OOXML worse, rather than better, because of dependencies.
On Friday, the ballots came back. Some contained votes on a small number of dispositions and some adopted the default option for all of the listed dispositions. The final tally (as recorded by participants, and subject to final confirmation) was as follows with respect to the "default" provision that on each vote covered all, or almost all, of the listed proposed dispositions:
P Countries Only All Votes
Approve 4 6
Disapprove 4 4
Refuse to Register
a Vote 2 4Abstain 15 18
Total votes cast: 25 32
The appropriate rules to be applied to these results are as follows:
1. Under Directive 9.1.4 under the standing rules of ISO/IEC JTC1, only the votes of "P" members are to be taken into account. However, Alex Brown, the Convenor, decided in advance, notwithstanding the rules, to allow all attending delegations to vote.
2. Only "approve" and "disapprove" votes are counted.
We can now turn to the two contentions that you will hear:
98.4% of the OOXML Proposed Dispositions were approved by a three to two majority at the BRM: The argument is as follows:
– Only "approve" and "disapprove" votes are to be counted. The rules are the rules
– That said, ignore the standing JTC1 rule that only P votes count
– Ignore the protests and abstentions, regardless of the fact that, together with the "disapprove" votes, they represent more than 80% of the delegations
– Ignore the fact that only c. 20 [Updated: 20 – 3o] substitutions out of c. 900 substantive dispositions, were actually discussed
The OOXML Proposed Dispositions were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegations in attendance at the BRM
– The purpose of the adoption process is to ensure that a quality specification is approved– The purpose of the process is also to achieve consensus on the final result, so that a finally approved specification is regarded as being appropriate, useful and desirable around the world
It is clear to me that the first conclusion is, at best, technically accurate, and even that conclusion assumes that the decision to allow O members to vote was justified. The better conclusion is that despite the good faith efforts of all concerned and their willingness to see this process through to its conclusion, it has proven to be impossible for as large and poorly prepared a specification as this to be properly addressed via the "Fast Track" process.
[Updated: it would be inaccurate to characterize choosing "abstain" as a default position on the last c. 900 dispositions as a rejection of those dispositions upon which the NB in question did not specifically vote. "No opinion" and acquiescence would be a fair characterization. The significant conclusion to take away is that while the National Bodies had a chance to stand up and say what there major concerns were, there was no opportunity for the great majority of the dispositions involved to be discussed in detail, and to be amended as necessary before being approved or disapproved.]
There are a number of conclusions that can be drawn from this result:
1. As many have contended, the Fast Track process was a totally inappropriate process for Microsoft and Ecma to have adopted for OOXML
2. OOXML has not been adequately addressed within that process to be entitled to final adoption
3. It would be inappropriate for the ISO/IEC members to approve the adoption of OOXML in the thirty day voting period ahead
Many, many, people around the world have tried very hard to make the OOXML adoption process work. It is very unfortunate that they were put to this predictably unsuccessful result through the self-interest of a single vendor taking advantage of a permissive process that was never intended to be abused in this fashion. It would be highly inappropriate to compound this error by approving a clearly unfinished specification in the voting period ahead.
To paraphrase a former First Lady, it’s time to "Just say No" to OOXML.
For further blog entries on , click here
I agree to the above. Why would someone want to do that? I wonder also why so many people are off topic on this site? It looks like it got flooded kinda? Maybe I should tell you about my site too – Embroidered Burp Cloths
I agree to the above. Why would someone want to do that? I wonder also why so many people are off topic on this site? It looks like it got flooded kinda? Maybe I should tell you about my site too – Embroidered Burp Cloths
"the Fast Track process was a totally inappropriate process for Microsoft and Ecma to have adopted for OOXML"
I agree 100%!
Why would this of ever let happen? Ever heard of "trial and error?" Come on people lets use common sense!
hdtv antenna
Seem like more than 20 countries accepted most dispositions. Not just 6. Country abst+no+refusal Percentage ———– ————— ———– China 1027 100.00% Ireland 1027 100.00% Ecuador 1027 100.00% China is the first one, it’s intresting.
Digital Frames
Unfortunately, something like this was predictable. The amount of work required to address concerns with this proposed ISO standard was way beyond what such a large group could meaningfully address in the time allotted.
It would be nice to think that Microsoft would follow the precident set by C++/CLI and now withdraw the standard.
But somehow I don’t see that happening.
the Fast Track process was a totally inappropriate process for Microsoft and Ecma to have adopted for OOXML
I agree 100%!
Why would this of ever let happen? Ever heard of "trial and error?"
hdtv antenna
Andy, I’m very familiar with the JTC1 directives… the one that you quote only applies if the room FAILS to get concensus, in which case the P members take over.
In this case though, looking at the numbers you quote, concensus was indeed reached in the room. So all that you draw on doesn’t apply. You are essentially saying that you believe that the majority of the room should not have bothered making the trip, as you don’t see value in their being in Geneva!
Your rationale essentially disenfranchises the many O countries present.
The decisions were made by everybody present, all views count. The result proves it.
Shame on you… this is a global society, we all count.
What is "consensus" defined as, then? How is 4 out of 25 or 6 out of 32 "consensus"?
Where is all this data from? I don’t see it anywhere else on the web.
Yes…I would like to know this too. Am I missing something here?
hdtv antenna
I think you are missing the word ‘task’ after Herculean. The most appropriate one for comparison might be cleaning the Augean stables in a day. So who in the allegory takes the roles of Hercules/Heracles, King Augeas, the rivers Alpheus and Peneus, and the cattle?
"You are essentially saying that you believe that the majority of the room should not have bothered making the trip, as you don’t see value in their being in Geneva!
Your rationale essentially disenfranchises the many O countries present."
You are intentionally mistaking things to discredit people.
The same logic would apply to fast-track ballot rules ( like the last september/07 ):
P-members are who approves the fast-tracking. O members only count to "non-approve" . Will you say that this rule discriminates O member?
This has to do with the "nature" of a P-member: P is PARTICIPATING. O is OBSERVER. Can you understand this difference?
<noDiplomacyHereSorry>
So, if O-members want to cast votes in BRMs, they will have to ask Microsoft some bucks and upgrade to P-members, as have done:
Cyprus island,
Jamaica island,
Malta island,
Lebanon
and the representative of Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) , Wemba Opota, a senegalese citizen, who is responsible for Microsoft West Africa and represent the Ivory Coast national interests in standardization.
This mentioned NBs, with 0 ( zero ) background and expertise in Document Description and Processing Languages ( http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/ ) had been upgraded by ISO JTC1 to P-member status a few days before last setember OOXML fast-tracking ballot close and are deciding on behalf world countries ( like mine, Argentina who has no vote in this fast-track fiasco ) what will be the international document standards for my sons in the following years
</noDiplomacyHereSorry>
Shame on you
Orlando Marcelo
I hope over the next weeks the abstainers will change their votes to reject the standard.
Andy,
I think the title of this piece is a bit misleading. Maybe the title will be correct, 30 days from now, when the final vote is clear, but right now I would say OOXML approval was not at stake at the BRM, deciding what ooxml would look like was at stake.
A second comment would be your remark that voting at the BRM should be limited to P-countries, I had the impression Alex Browns called the shots at the BRM, and what he says goes. An unenviable task but so far I think he did as best as he or anyone could.
Actually, I kind of like the outcome of the BRM. One thing that always worried me was that with all those comments being discussed and changed (one would hope) the final text would not be available within 30 days. With this outcome the final text of ecma 376 will be available within a week and it is really clear what the NB’s are voting for
Peter G>
ps: well, really clear, it must be somewhere in those 9000+ pages 😉
Andy, you’re deprecating your quality standardL Leave the propaganda to the no-ooxml folks.
If you prefer direct to indirect reporting, check out http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/29/BRM-narrative
-Tim
I can see several of the larger delegations being able to mark an approval (or disapproval) for a lot of those 900 issues and then not give a general vote.
Andy would then list that as abstain even though such a country might have approved (or disappovred) hundreds of those issues.
First, thanks to the comments so far – including the errors that people spotted for me that have now been corrected. I spoke three times at the Open Forum Europe conference, have been in meetings formal and informal from early until very late every day, and there was a lot going on around me while I was trying to post this, and unfortunately, it showed.
On to other more "interesting," and invariably anonymous comments, such as one that included the following:
The next question:
And next this:
To Orlando: Thanks for defending my arguments.
To this anonymous commenter:
To Tim Bray:
I expect that there will be more comments to answer tomorrow.
To all that have followed this process in the long term, there are two conclusions to draw: as close as the right thing happened today as could have been expected, and it ain’t over yet.
Best regards to all,
– Andy
I see one more comment before I log off for the day (I’m still in Geneva):
In the numbers that I reported, I have only called a vote an "abstain" if that is what the delegation marked on its ballot as the "default" vote on any proposed dispositions as to which it did not indicate a specific vote.
– Andy
So if for instance the UK approved 99.99% of the issues and set a default vote of no on the remaining 0.01% you count that as a disapproval vote ?
Nice voting numbers that makes
I’m not aware of any delegation that voted disposition by disposition on a large number of comments, but if they did vote on almost all, you’re point would be well taken. I’d be surprised if this actually happened, however.
– Andy
You have always come close to the line. Sad to say, no longer factual, or quasi-objective. You have officially "jumped the shark" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark]. You are in too deep. Have lost perspective. It’s a shame.
Dear Shark,
Help me out here; can you please point to the inaccuracies? If you follow the links that I’ve added at the end to blog entries written by delegates in the room, as well as read the articles in the press where delegates were interviewed and quoted, you’ll see that my piece is entirely consistent with all of this information from direct participants.
Also, signing your name is always helpful for context.
– Andy
Andy,
I’m won’t be composing a blog entry on the BRM for a bit, but I wil point out that your article contains surprising inaccuracies about what the subject of the vote was, how it worked, and what the governing rules were. A health warning is in order.
Alex,
As a distant observer of this process, I’ll note that minutes of meetings are the common device used to forestall "surprising inaccuracies about what the subject of the vote was". I am still amazed that ISO see fit to conduct important meetings without public minutes.
Regards, Glen Turner
Show me the minutes…
Well what was it about then? What’s the correct story Alex?
Alex,
I would appreciate it if you would be more specific than to simply cast a
shadow over this blog post. As you can see, some people who haven’t
signed their posts or been specific are attacking he post without saying
why..
I have confirmed the accuracy of this blog entry with several delegates, as
well as JTC1 rules experts. While I respect your opinion, and while being
the convenor of the BRM makes you responsible for interpreting and applying
the rules, this does not mean that your interpretation of the rules will
necessarily be correct.
If you have issues instead with any factual data, what the delegates
thought was happening is in an important respect as important, or more so,
than what the convenor thinks. The delegates have the responsibility to
vote and act as instructed. If they understand that differently than you
do, then I think it is fair to say that you and Gabriel Barta, on the one
hand, and the delegates, on the other, bear equal opportunity.if there is
any disagreement after the fact.
For now, I would state that "it is your opinion that there are
inaccuracies". Whether that is in fact the case can only be determined
when you identify what you find to be inaccurate. The kind of statement
you have left here does no good to anyone, other than the obvious.
– Andy
Stephen McGibbon (Microsoft)
Andy why don’t you say who the anonymous delegates you spoke to are? What you’re claiming is essentially unverifiable, and as Alex was the convenor I’m sure many will be concerned that he doesn’t concur with your thoughts.
As I understand, ISO have rules about what information is giving out by whom and when. I know that Bob Sutor disagrees with this, and imagine you may as well given that you’ve chosen to ignore the etiquette – but by choosing to ignore and not being open and transparent about who you’re referring to you effectively poison the discussion as those who wish to respect ISO’s rules are unable to engage on the substance of your comments.
At least this way we could loop in the folks giving you the information and find out whether they’ve got an axe to grind, are simply mistaken, or have uncovered the mother of all conspiracies.
> Andy why don’t you say who the anonymous delegates you spoke to are?
Witchhunts are lovely this time of year…
> What you’re claiming is essentially unverifiable, and as Alex was the convenor I’m sure many will be concerned that he doesn’t concur with your thoughts.
Alex is free to point out his concern by posting here. His lack of description is as unverifiable as the anonymous delegates, no?
> As I understand, ISO have rules about what information is giving out by whom and when.
ISO controls blog posts now? It’s understandable why delegates would refrain from wanting their names published, because of unprovoked FUD from certain members of this process.
> I know that Bob Sutor disagrees with this, and imagine you may as well given that you’ve chosen to ignore the etiquette – but by choosing to ignore and not being open and transparent about who you’re referring to you effectively poison the discussion as those who wish to respect ISO’s rules are unable to engage on the substance of your comments.
This blog post is trying to be open and transparent, what little etiquette this BRM has earned be damned. Saying little about the facts and pulling the Microsoft PR partyline is poisoning the discussion, because you don’t say what really happened. Have you read Tim Bray’s blog post? He thought the process was bullshit. Yet yourself and Brian have praised it… who is likely to believe your version of events?
> At least this way we could loop in the folks giving you the information and find out whether they’ve got an axe to grind, are simply mistaken, or have uncovered the mother of all conspiracies.
How about you post what is wrong with this article, and the anonymous delegates will be informed thus.
Anonymous
Steve,
My primary source was Frank Farance, the Head of Delegation for the US. Frank affiliation with either Microsoft or IBM, and, as a Head of Delegation, was in all HoD meetings. He’s also an old standards hand, and at least once corrected Alex on a vote that was about to be taken in a way that would have been invalid.
I conducted an extensive interview with Frank after posting this blog entry, which I hope to have posted (after he reviews my transcription of his comments) on Monday.
– Andy
Stephen from Microsoft says:
<blockquote>As I understand, ISO have rules about what information is giving out by whom and when. I know that Bob Sutor disagrees with this, and imagine you may as well given that you’ve chosen to ignore the etiquette – but by choosing to ignore and not being open and transparent about who you’re referring to you effectively poison the discussion as those who wish to respect ISO’s rules are unable to engage on the substance of your comments.</blockquote>
I could not agree with you more Stephen. During this round of the DIS29500 BRM, I see that the Microsoft blogging machine is already claiming victory and is doing their best to "poison the discussion" concerning DIS29500 with mis-information and rumor long before any official information is released and long before final information is in. At least sites like this one and Groklaw acknowledge that their information is preliminary and subject to change at a time when Microsoft is already claiming final victory.
Meanwhile other parts of the "Microsoft Blog Machine" are doing their best to shut down any-and-all bloggers that have opposing or conflicting viewpoints to the MS party line and any blogger in particular that attempts to provide analysis of the vote based on the publicized rules of the BRM + whatever scanty information can be verified from the BRM. I suspect that over the next week, we’re going to find out what really happened behind those closed doors and I suspect we’re going to get really sick at the extent of the MS arm-twisting that went on behind those closed doors.
The OpenMalaysia blog has already condemned ECMA with the statement that any substantive changes (that would have required MS to modify Office2007) were routinely shot down at the BRM and not even considered for evaluation or vote. That statement alone says worlds about how MS has ignored or corrupted the ISO rules during the BRM and now you come along and want the world to wait ‘until official information is released’ while the time period for the NB votes and review expires and while MS continues it’s mis-leading blog posts, behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, ‘discussion-poisoning’ blog comments, vote buying and various astroturf campaigns around the world unhindered.
Who is it exactly that is choosing to respect the ISO rules ? You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that Microsoft respects the rules of the IEC/ISO JTC 1 given that the EU has just launched an investigation into their conduct during the ballot period ending September 2, 2007 or convincing me that Microsoft is "respecting the rules" given the recent news that MS is using NGOs to pressure the India standards body using an astroturf campaign based on Microsoft-generated form letters from Microsoft partners giving ‘fake’ support to DIS29500 to change their vote, or that Microsoft is respecting the ISO rules when Jason Matusow has already blogged that the BRM is a huge win for the DIS29500 and quotes Tim Bray’s blog post out of context in an attempt to manufacture some support for this blatant and increasingly desperate spin.
Ed
— An individual citizen of the net that prizes openness, software freedom, marketplace choice, and open standards, but most of all integrity and honor in all dealings – business, personal and international.
Seconding Brian Jones, the BRM made great progress. Once the editorial stuff was out of the way [1] the BRM worked through 20 of approximately 900 issues this week. It seems as though the only thing standing in the way of a quality specification is a bit more time to work out the remaining issues. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that another 45 weeks should do it for the fast-track process.
[1] In my own committee work, we’ve always had editors who were specifically chartered to correct stuff like that. They would issue a report and it would be voted on (unanimity required for approval) in a flash.
Other numbers here
http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/02/29/the-open-xml-ballot-resolution-meeting-brm-was-an-unqualified-success.aspx#7976508
Seem like more than 20 countries accepted most dispositions. Not just 6.
Country abst+no+refusal Percentage
———– ————— ———–
China 1027 100.00%
Ireland 1027 100.00%
Ecuador 1027 100.00%
Netherland 1027 100.00%
Mexico 1027 100.00%
Malaysia 1022 99.51%
Korea (s) 1021 99.42%
New Zealand 1018 99.12%
Australia 1008 98.15%
India 1005 97.86%
Italy 995 96.88%
Belgium 986 96.01%
Israel 983 95.72%
Kenya 970 94.45%
US 966 94.06%
France 965 93.96%
Greece 963 93.77%
Portugal 935 91.04%
Japan 934 90.94%
Denmark 912 88.80%
Canada 886 86.27%
South Africa 875 85.20%
Denmark 871 84.81%
Brazil 573 55.79%
Switzerland 349 33.98%
UK 187 18.21%
Czech 7 0.68%
Finland 6 0.58%
Poland (O member) 4 0.39%
Chile (O member) 1 0.10%
Ivory Coast (MS HOD)(*) 0 0.00%
NO (MS HOD) 0 0.00%
(*) http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-43510/ivory-coast-represented-by-microsoft-senegal-at-the-brm
>Other numbers here
>http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/02/29/the-open-xml-ballot-resolution-meeting-brm-was-an-unqualified-success.aspx#7976508
>Seem like more than 20 countries accepted most dispositions. Not just 6.
You can’t count…it is a list of countries that did not approve things…only the last ones did actually want Ecma/Microsofts changes. The level of FUD and spin from the Microsoft camp reaches new levels.
Great work Andy…please keep us informed.That the Microsoft people can’t point out real errors in you blog posts are true indication that you are spot on.
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How can those figures be right if we have the only confirmed result by everyone which is that almost all results are accepted.
Isn’t the only offical result of a BRM a list with approved edits and as such the only result from the BRM seems very fruitfull.
How can those figures be right if we have the only confirmed result by everyone which is that almost all results are accepted.
Because the numbers are for everything except "approve" votes, abstentions included. The only way to reconcile that with Alex’ statement that most of the proposed revisions passed is to conclude that a the overwhelming majority of votes were dominated by abstentions. Unlike a letter ballot, there’s no requirement that one of these votes have a minimum percentage in favor, so if you have a solid bloc that voted "yes" to everything (see the Ivory Coast, for instance) you could get everything approved even if there was only one vote in favor.
Put another way, the winner by a landslide was, "What-EVER!
Andy,
Your figures on default voting positions are accurate, but extremely misleading. The majority of countries adopted a default "abstain" position, and then voted individually on the issues (some countries on all issues, and some countries on just the issues that they had raised). Thus, to describe them as "abstaining" is incorrect.
Since you apparently have a source willing to provide you with information from the BRM, I suggest you ask them for the "BRM Voting Count" spreadsheet, and analyse the detailed numbers yourself. Pay particular attention to the "Total Yes" column, for the issues that passed. My analysis of these numbers paints a very different picture than yours.
Inigo
I agree with Inigo that you have used a few factoids to paint a very misleading picture. And non-factoids too … 80 percent protesting? That is downright funny to anyone who was in the room. Maybe 80 percent of the folks at the bar at the InterContinental each evening were protesting, or the people at the OFE event.
It’s interesting to me that there was never a single complaint about O-Members participating in all of the votes we took all week, and O-Members were very active in the technical discussions and preparations of draft resolutions, but as soon as Sam Oh announced the voting results late Friday afternoon, your various friends from the InterContinental started protesting and making lists of O-Members who shouldn’t have had any say in the matter. Did you guy anticipate a different outcome?
– Doug Mahugh, member of US delegation (sorry, I didn’t bother to create an account here because I’m posting from a Swiss keyboard at the Geneva airport and it’s a time-consuming hassle to check my email … somebody needs to standardize keyboards!)
We apparently have a "Wall of Money" on one side … how much could Microsoft afford to spend in an effort to have ISO issue a standard for "Whatever format Microsoft Office 2007 uses to store its documents on disk", and still come out ahead ?
On the other side, there are a bunch of technical experts, some corporate, some academic, who answered the question of "how should we store long-lived reviseable office productivity documents" with what became ISO 26300 ODF XML; who answered "No, there is no point in ISO issuing a standard for Microsoft Office 2007, and in fact it is damaging if ISO do that.".
Yes, I work for one of these corporations; but I don’t represent them. I’m also a physicist and engineer; I can see how to reuse ISO26300 documents an all sorts of ways ; but I can’t see what else you can do with a DIS29500 document apart from "Buy a copy of Windows and Office".
An ISO26300 document can be mine. A DIS29500 document is "marketing material for Microsoft".
If you got the ‘technical experts’ together again, they would come up again with something like ISO26300.
Is there a public interest in "caving to pressure from the wall of money" or "resisting the pressure of the wall of money" ? I understand there are a variety of private interests around … Microsoft would obviously like the "caving to pressure" result … but ISO is a "public interest" body.
How to establish the public interest, and keep it established ?
On your Dollar Bills, it says "Good for all debts, public and private". This is a "public" one.
I applaud the BRM … it was a rare forum where things could be discussed without the intrusion of commercial lawyers, pointy-headed businessmen, heavily-invested shareholders expecting returns from their investments … a place where engineers, scientists, and public officials could speak.
But what next ?
Inigo and Doug,
First, thank you both for commenting. I’m finding that there is a difference of opinion among delegates as to what they thought they were indicating when they were voting on the final c. 900 dispositions. This is probably not surprising under the circumstances. Some of the explanations that I have heard, though (I just got another by email), I’m having a great deal of trouble understanding, as they seem illogical on their face. I’m hoping that a lot of delegates will do what you’re doing in commenting here so that people can try and sort it all out.
With that by way of background, here are some responses to your comments:
1. Inigo, on the subject of the votes on specific dispositions: I agree that what you say makes a great deal of sense, but my bet is that it will be impossible to draw conclusions in all cases based on such an analysis. Assuming for example that the figures that someone has posted above are accurate, how would one know the following:
And so on. What concerns me is that, according to Frank Farance, those dispositions that were discussed were almost invariably changed, often quite a bit. So while a disposition might have been "approved" by as few as one NB in addition to all of the abstains, I’m not sure how much to be comforted by that.
I would certainly agree that if the one vote that was received, or if one of the votes that was included in the "approve" category, was from the NB that had asked for a change, this would certainly be an important point to be taken into account (but not if that NB voted to disapprove – see above, and that carried the day), then I would agree that the 900 vote process was a useful device. So here’s the analysis that I would pursue:
Does that sound like a rational way to do the analysis? If so, what’s your guess on the number that remains after the first three bullets, and also for the last bullet?
2. Doug, I don’t think I said that 80% were "protesting." What I was saying, and as the blog entry title indicates, 80% of the proposed dispositions failed to gain majority approval. I’m not sure how you can call an "abstention" anything other than that. If someone chooses not only not to vote on an individual disposition, but to abstain on the rest, then it’s hard for me to see this as anything other than "no comment."
That said, I agree that it would be fair to say that (for instance) if a proposed disposition got several votes to approve (including the original NB proponent(s), then it should be deducted from the 80% figure.
3. Doug, I talked to a lot of delegates, both at the wine and cheese events and the evening keynote sessions and at lunch as well as at the bar at the Intercontinental. They were from a lot of delegations, and few were affiliates of IBM. All agreed that everyone was trying very hard, and that it was all very frustrating. I also agree that doing the 900 vote was a good idea, if the goal was to come out of the BRM having done _something_ with everything.
But was that actually a good idea? My personal view is that a better result would have been to have voted something along the lines of "this is as much as we had time to do; no opinion is expressed on the rest," or perhaps to deal with the last 900 on a different basis (e.g., "the indications on these 900 should be regarded as advisory, rather than authoritative").
It seems to me that no one’s interests are well served by doing so much in so little time. If those that want to see OOXML go through are successful, then we will have to live with a standard that could have been much better if more time had been spent. And if it fails, then those that wanted to see it go through, and those that tried hard to try and make that happen, will have seen that work to have been in vain.
In that case, hopefully Ecma would still make the changes and Microsoft would implement them. If that happens, something would be salvaged, but more could have been accomplished.
4. Doug, on the P vs. O point: I’ve included this mostly because I know that it’s going to be brought up by others. I’m not personally that interested in it, because I think that the big questions are these:
I’m not competent to judge the first, so I’ll defer to others on that. But I think I have heard enough on the second point to have an opinion. Many delegates told me that OOXML as it came from Ecma was not ready for prime time (the words usually used were "total garbage" or similar). Many also told me that the process was crippled at every stage by inadequate time to do a good job. Thus, the BRM was just the latest and most clearly problematic example of an effort to cram something through in a way that is not conducive to producing a good result.
Just because there was a "result" does not mean that it was an adequate or useful result. Just that a lot of good people worked very hard to do the best they could in a situation that they really shouldn’t have been placed in to begin with. My concern is that it be made clear to all what the results of the BRM really were. Needless to say, I don’t think that Jason Matusow’s Unqualified Success blog entry is consistent with what happened. To the extent that my blog entry isn’t either, I welcome and appreciate your assistance in tuning it up.
Again, thank you both for commenting, and responses to the above are welcome.
– Andy
aTtakR giaiwiyyxeup, [url=http://jfqzqabhmcjl.com/]jfqzqabhmcjl[/url], [link=http://aenxxutthzan.com/]aenxxutthzan[/link], http://nackpkragwkt.com/
Andy,
The votes haven’t been made public by ISO, so I’m very sorry, but I can only speak in general terms. With that in mind:
"Assuming for example that the figures that someone has posted above are accurate" – I haven’t checked them, but at first glance they look plausible. However, they conflate the "Disapprove" with "Abstain", which makes them almost meaningless. As I explained above, some delegations were abstaining on all issues except issues their own countries had raised. Since the figures that the BRM delegates have access to list "Disapprove" separately from "Abstain", I can only conclude that someone has deliberately merged the original figures to reduce the amount of information that they convey in the interests of promoting their own agenda.
"those dispositions that were discussed were almost invariably changed, often quite a bit" – this is true. However, countries were naturally going to bring up for discussion those dispositions that needed change! There were also, inevitably, many dispositions that were simple and straightforward and required no discussion. I think the interesting question to ask is where the line between those positions should be drawn; i.e. "What proportion of the issues that required discussion were discussed to the NB’s satisfaction?". I think you would get many different answers to that.
I have been going through the votes to help inform my own national body. I have been checking the positions that we adopted against the vote outcome, to see whether everything that we approved was accepted and that everything that we disapproved was rejected. I have also been working out the margin by which "approve" votes were passed, and how many votes there were made on each of these issues. If ISO makes the votes public, then I’ll be delighted to publish my analysis, but until then I must respect their decision on publication. I think I reasonably can say, though, that your concern about dispositions being voted on by only a single or very few delegations are unfounded.
Inigo
Thanks for your quick response. I’ll look forward to seeing the numbers if they are released. It seems like people did the best they could under the circumstances, but necessarily quite a bit less than they would have, had there been no boundaries on the amount of time they could have spent.
I have heard from many others (and I’ll try to get them to blog with comments here as well) that adopting the ballot approach at best was a necessary evil. Another way of looking at it is that if a ballot was deemed to be acceptable, there would not be a requirement for BRMs at all.
I am told that someone from the Indian delegation made this point in a different way, saying that if he had known that all he was going to be able to do was to fill in a ballot, he would have preferred to have saved the public the cost of his transportation, and had more than one night to do the job as well.
– Andy
> all he was going to be able to do was to fill in a ballot
Andy, are you under the impression that filling in a ballot was the _only_ thing people did all week. That might explain some things!
Alex,
Hardly. But let me answer in detail at your main comment.
– Andy
Andy hi
Allow me to sympathise with your difficulty in understanding the JTC 1 rules, the BRM resolutions, and the conceptual framework surrounding them. These are hard topics. Normally standards people learn about such things through training, experience, mentoring and study. Not through floundering around in the comment section of a contentious blog entry, whose key assertions are the highly misleading consequence of a lack of understanding and suitable data.
Would you agree with me that your blog has become the epicentre of much of the current public understanding surrounding the BRM? Are you proud of that?
First, I simply _cannot_ _believe_ your entry title, which states "OOXML Fails to Achieve Majority Approval at BRM". Anybody who has read any of the key documents associated with this process (the Directives, the FAQ, the agenda, even my blog for heavens sake) knows that the BRM does not "approve" or "disapprove" OOXML. That is BRM 101 stuff. Had you really not grasped the basic fact that the meeting only changes the text, and does "approve" or "disapprove" the spec?
Now, turning to some of your other issues:
> If the only vote received was from an NB other than the NB that had lodged the comment
> it seems that this vote would prevail.
This is a nonsense statement. NBs vote on proposed dispositions, not comments. This concept of the comment sponsor having extra weight in their vote is completely alien to ISO and IEC voting procedures. What strange place is this stuff coming from?
> If only two votes were received on that disposition, one from the NB most interested
> and one vote from another NB, and the two votes were not the same, then two would cancel out,
> if I understand the process correctly. What exactly would that tell you?
The only two kinds of vote that would "cancel out" are an approve and a disapprove. In this case the vote on the disposition would be a tie and the disposition would not be approved. Draw from that what conclusion you want!
> If no one voted on a single disposition (even the original NB that made the comment
> that generated the proposed disposition), does that mean that it’s a good one, or that
> no one had the time to really think it through, or couldn’t decide?
Who knows what it means, this is voting not mind reading. BTW, there were no such "unvoted on" dispositions.
> those dispositions that were discussed were almost invariably changed
well yes, obviously. If a country brought up a disposition for discussion it would probably be to get some change made, right? It is a false inference from this that _every_ comment would require NB change.
> Does that sound like a rational way to do the analysis?
Andy, I wish you many happy hours with the spreadsheet. But I’m not sure what you propose will get you anything useful or significant.
> if someone chooses not only not to vote on an individual disposition,
> but to abstain on the rest, then it’s hard for me to see this as anything
> other than "no comment."
NBs abstain for all kinds of reasons, so you should hesitate to interpret it in any particular way. In my experience, abstention most usually signals the wish to register a lack of technical understanding or engagement (which is perfectly ok).
> But was that actually a good idea? My personal view is that […]
The key point here is that it was, almost by definition, a good idea because it is WHAT THE MEETING VOTED TO DO. With no dissent.
Andy, you then go on to make some general criticisms about the Fast Track process which are all fair play (not that I will comment). However, I am very concerned about the misleading headline of your article and the misleading presentation of figures which supports it, leaving aside sundry other inaccuracies which are less important but which could usefuly be corrected once accurate information is available from ISO and IEC, and a fuller picture can emerge.
Alex,
Thanks very much for taking the time to leave detailed comments. I appreciate that, since clearly you are the most informed and knowledgeable person about what happened at the BRM. Let me start by clarifying a few things, and then maybe you would feel more comfortable in our having a friendlier dialogue.
With that as prelude, let me also say the following before I come back to your individual points:
I personally believe that there is a limit to how far one should go in trying to cram 600 pounds of potatoes into a five pound bag. What I mean is that at some point I believe that it would be more useful and forthright for the final vote to have been something like the following instead: "Do you approve, disapprove or abstain from the following conclusion: "The National Bodies believe that it would be misleading to attempt to vote on any dispositions beyond those that have been discussed and amended, as necessary, in the ordinary course of a BRM" beyond the 200 or so that included only minor editorial issues. At some point, I think that loyalty to the goal of completion becomes counterproductive, and even unwise. After all, true democracy has been achieved only as a result of the willingness of those in the breach to revolt against the rules.
Could you find the right to take such a vote in the Directives? I don’t know the answer to that, but I don’t think that the Directives ever contemplated having to process a poorly written 6,000 page plus specification being submitted for Fast Track consideration. So again, being too bound to the rules could lead to an unfortunate result.
With that by way of orientation, let me try and respond to your comments:
Alex: Allow me to sympathise with your difficulty in understanding the JTC 1 rules, the BRM resolutions, and the conceptual framework surrounding them. These are hard topics. Normally standards people learn about such things through training, experience, mentoring and study. Not through floundering around in the comment section of a contentious blog entry, whose key assertions are the highly misleading consequence of a lack of understanding and suitable data.
Andy: I do agree. I should clarify, though, that what I have been writing is not just someone’s clueless wandering around in the dark, but of an ongoing dialogue throughout the week with a number of delegates forming an opinion over time, including several who are quite adept at applying those same rules.
Alex: Would you agree with me that your blog has become the epicentre of much of the current public understanding surrounding the BRM? Are you proud of that?
Andy: If the alternative would have been that the public would only have had Jason Matusow’s blog entry, absolutely. His entry reads like a set of Microsoft talking points that were written before the BRM even ended. I would be staggered if they have not been sent already to hundreds of Microsoft marketing people around the world. Do you disagree? The difference is that I will incorporate all changes into my record as they become appropriate (and have already done so). I do not expect that changes will be made to Microsoft’s marketing message.
Alex: First, I simply _cannot_ _believe_ your entry title, which states "OOXML Fails to Achieve Majority Approval at BRM". Anybody who has read any of the key documents associated with this process (the Directives, the FAQ, the agenda, even my blog for heavens sake) knows that the BRM does not "approve" or "disapprove" OOXML. That is BRM 101 stuff. Had you really not grasped the basic fact that the meeting only changes the text, and does "approve" or "disapprove" the spec?
Andy: I agree that the title should have read "OOXML _Dispositions_ fail…" However, I have consistently made clear in everything I write, and the text of this entry makes clear, that the final vote is only now taking place. I was putting in 18 hour days all week as well (I do have a day job), so we shared fatigue all around. I’ve changed the title now that you’ve flagged it, but will stand by the proposition that "abstentions" do not represent approval under these circumstances.
Alex: Now, turning to some of your other issues:
> [Andy’s comment} If the only vote received was from an NB other than the NB that had lodged the comment it seems that this vote would prevail.
This is a nonsense statement. NBs vote on proposed dispositions, not comments. This concept of the comment sponsor having extra weight in their vote is completely alien to ISO and IEC voting procedures. What strange place is this stuff coming from?
Andy: From common sense, which makes me wonder whether the rules display any? Tell me where I go wrong here: A proposed disposition is created in response to a comment appended to an NB vote. Let’s assume that the comment was, "OOXML only supports Western texts that read from left to right; we request that it also support languages that read in the opposite direction." The proposed disposition agrees. The original NB doesn’t bother to vote on this, or does vote "yes," and two NBs vote "no." Is the disposition then defeated? If so, is this a good result?
Alex: > [Andy’s comment} If only two votes were received on that disposition, one from the NB most interested and one vote from another NB, and the two votes were not the same, then two would cancel out, if I understand the process correctly. What exactly would that tell you?
The only two kinds of vote that would "cancel out" are an approve and a disapprove. In this case the vote on the disposition would be a tie and the disposition would not be approved. Draw from that what conclusion you want!
Andy: The conclusion that I would draw is that this is a poster child example of why disposing of 900 proposed dispositions with an overnight ballot does lip service to completion and serves noones best interests.
Alex: >[Andy’s comment} If no one voted on a single disposition (even the original NB that made the comment that generated the proposed disposition), does that mean that it’s a good one, or that no one had the time to really think it through, or couldn’t decide?
Who knows what it means, this is voting not mind reading. BTW, there were no such "unvoted on" dispositions.
Andy: As someone who will have to live with the consequences of OOXML if it is adopted, I say again that this is an example of why the decision made to batch vote on all 900 was unfortunate. Before you say that the NBs will be well able to factor this into their responses, recall the intense pressure that they will be under.
Alex: > [Andy’s comment} those dispositions that were discussed were almost invariably changed
well yes, obviously. If a country brought up a disposition for discussion it would probably be to get some change made, right? It is a false inference from this that _every_ comment would require NB change.
Andy: No, but when we are already dealing with a specification that came in the door with very poor quality which then had to be worked over in a limited time period with the input of only selected parties, many of them interested, then making it a bit better is not much of a victory. I say again that if the best that can be done is to make something a bit better, then a more forthright conclusion of the BRM would be not to lend its credibility by approving that proposed disposition at all.
Alex: > [Andy’s comment} Does that sound like a rational way to do the analysis?
Andy, I wish you many happy hours with the spreadsheet. But I’m not sure what you propose will get you anything useful or significant.
Andy: Actually, I was responding to the suggestion of a delegate that if one took on this unusual and arduous job that I would be comforted. I tried to accept that suggestion and see how such an analysis could be productively performed.
Alex: > [Andy’s comment} if someone chooses not only not to vote on an individual disposition, but to abstain on the rest, then it’s hard for me to see this as anything other than "no comment."
NBs abstain for all kinds of reasons, so you should hesitate to interpret it in any particular way. In my experience, abstention most usually signals the wish to register a lack of technical understanding or engagement (which is perfectly ok).
Andy: I agree that this would be the normal situation. It’s a bit harder to tell when someone who is already frustrated and tired is checking off a ballot overnight that has over 900 items to vote on. Had each of the 900 been brought up in the normal course, would some of the abstainers have joined in the discussion? Unquestionably. Would the vote have come out differently on some of them? Statistical probability makes that almost inevitable. Would the text of some of the dispositions be changed as well? I don’t think this can be questioned. Would the final dispositions in toto have been improved? The answer to me is obvious
Alex: > [Andy’s comment} But was that actually a good idea? My personal view is that […]
The key point here is that it was, almost by definition, a good idea because it is WHAT THE MEETING VOTED TO DO. With no dissent.
Andy: Ah, here is where we finally get to the nub of the matter, and where I think the process and the fast track questions must come back together. Just because a decision is made in accordance with rules does not make it a good decision – just a conformant decision. I accept that you, as convenor, were under a duty to try and cover all 1,100 dispositions, and you deserve credit for upholding the rules and achieving that result. But I do not accept that the result was a good result, or that the delegations should have passed this vote. When the rules were not made to address such a contingency, then following the rules blindly does not serve an honorable purpose. For some time now, the phrase "We were only following orders" has not been as credible as it used to be, eh?
Alex: Andy, you then go on to make some general criticisms about the Fast Track process which are all fair play (not that I will comment). However, I am very concerned about the misleading headline of your article and the misleading presentation of figures which supports it, leaving aside sundry other inaccuracies which are less important but which could usefuly be corrected once accurate information is available from ISO and IEC, and a fuller picture can emerge.
Andy: I acknowledge some inaccuracies, which I have already addressed; if there are any remaining, do bring them to my attention and I’ll address them as well. After all, you have to acknowledge that the public wasn’t allowed to listen in first hand, although they do have to live with the results.
But I disagree that we can really separate the issue of whether OOXML should have been fast tracked with how the BRM concluded. This whole OOXML process from the beginning has been like a runaway train careering down the tracks, with no one willing to pull the emergency brake line. Blindly following the rules can, and often does, result in disaster. If OOXML is finally adopted at the end of March, the BRM will have assisted in a far less useful standard being adopted to ensure that those "billions and billions of documents" remain accessible. As an interested party in such a result, along with everyone else in the world, I look to those that control and participate in the process to protect me.
There have been situations in my career where I have resigned positions rather than remain part of a process that I thought was off the rails. I think that those in the BRM process who were trying to do the right thing simply lost sight of what the right thing might be. I also expect that this is much easier to realize from the outside than it was in the inside in the heat of the moment and under the fatigue of the effort.
I’m sorry that we didn’t meet in Geneva, and hope we have the opportunity to do so in the future.
Andy
In all the different (political) meetings I’ve ever been in as either a participant or a chairman, it was customary for the chairman to draw up the agenda for a meeting according to the following rules:
1) schedule proposals on which the decision is a formality (to do away with stuff that can be implemented) and decide on them right away
2) then do a tally of the remaining proposals and draw up a schedule on what needs to be discussed
3) suggest (controversial) proposals where a large number of the participants indicate their urge to be heard to be taken off-line, either to resolve them by the end of the meeting or at a later date.
4) schedule proposals with little comments to be handled first.
Alex, as far as I can tell the way you approached this BRM is the exact opposite of what I described above and (as you indicate yourself) in the end leaves a lot of room for interpreting the meaning of the votes on the comments not being discussed.
With 20-20 hindsight, would you have chosen a different approach to the BRM, for example with the (universally) tried and tested method I described here?
Andy,
"If those that want to see OOXML go through are successful, then we will have to live with a standard that could have been much better if more time had been spent."
In all of the discussions about the BRM, there is talk about an attempt to make DIS 29500 a better standard. But I have never been able to figure out who wants a better DIS 29500?
MS and Ecma have never shown any interest in a "better" DIS29500 standard, only in one that is even more closely aligned with MS Office 2007. I remember that MS have not committed to implement anything in DIS29500 that deviates from Ecma 376 (or Office 2007).
Few, if any, outside MS have been able to implement anything more than partial read-only access to MS Office 2007 Ecma 376 documents. I believe even MS Office for the Mac has not been able to do high fidelity processing of Ecma 376 documents. But anything easier to implement will be incompatible with MS Office 2007 documents. So why bother?
Who are those people not paid by MS waiting for a better DIS29500 that will not be implemented by MS?
Winter
Winter,
From a pragmatic point of view, there are many developers in the Microsoft ecosystem who I expect don’t care which standard wins, so long as they one they have to deal with is well documented, or may even prefer OOXML (Aptiva is one that comes to mind, which plans to make money off of OOXML). Same for customers, who don’t yet "get it" about why they should care. And then there are all of those delegates who have tried in good faith to do what they were asked to do.
As you can see from my own comments, I think that this attitude is counterproductive, but hey, it’s a big world, and I’m sure that different people are going to have different opinions. And then there’s the simple truth that if ISO/IEC JTC1 does approve OOXML, the better it is, the better everyone will be that has to live with it.
– Andy
Alex Brown has been kind enough to offer some comments, to which I have responded. They are in the set of comments just above this post and are, I think, quite useful in fleshing out what those in the room were trying to accomplish with their vote on 900 proposed dispositions, and why I personally think that this decision while well intentioned, was not a good decision.
– Andy
For those that have asked for additional information on my sources, I see that Frank Farance has been quoted in a number of articles now. While there were many delegates I spoke to in addition to Frank, he is a Head of Delegation (for the US), and therefore was a part of discussions in HoD meetings as well as in general meetings. Here are some of his statements, with links to where they can be found:
ComputerWorld article (Eric Lai):
EfluxMedia article (Alice Turner: Same quotes
InfoWorld/IDG News Service article (Peter Sayer):
ComputerWorld article (John Fontana):
Wasn’t Frank one of only three votes in the final INCITS executive board that voted against the US approval of OOXML (12 for approval and Frank together with IBM, and Oracle voting no)
It can’t be surprising to anyone that he would react like this
My recollection is that Frank is a member of the Executive Committee of INCITS that voted on OOXML last summer. I don’t recollect at this point, though, how he voted, although it would not surprise me if he was one of the "no" votes.
I think that what is remarkable, though, is that the US delegation to the BRM – which included Microsoft employees and supporters as well as folks like Rob Weir – agreed to vote "no" as its default on the 900 dispositions. They should really be given credit for this, and it’s consistent with the uniform accounts of the meeting that say that everyone displayed an unusual degree of cooperation in trying to process OOXML under impossilbe conditions. My only complaint is that those that adopted "abstain" as a default tried too hard.
My personal choice for how the BRM should have ended would have been with a vote that it was impossible to make any useful statement about the 900 batch of dispositions at all, and calling for further review to be taken before a vote. I see in Rob Weir’s account that something along these lines was considered earlier in the week, but (unfortunately) not adopted as a plan of action.
– Andy
"9 Voting
9.1 General
9.1.4 In a meeting, except as otherwise specified in these directives,
questions are decided by a majority of the votes cast at the meeting
by *P-members* expressing either approval or disapproval."
"9.1.10 At all levels of voting, if more than 50% of the P-members
*have not voted*, the vote will have *failed*. Late votes shall not be
counted. No extensions shall be granted."
–Dario
Dario, SC34 issued an FAQ about the conduct of the BRM on Nov 15, http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0932.htm – check para 6.8: "If votes are taken at the BRM, who votes? Those present."
Paragraphs 6.5 and 6.6 (rather confusingly, for a document titled to be about the BRM) talk about O or P status remaining fixed as at the September vote, but it’s in a section titled "Voting" which seems to describe the ballot process as a whole. So for votes at the BRM, it seems P or O membership is as per September, but as anyone at the meeting can vote, membership status is therefore irrelevant. I think…
>Dario, SC34 issued an FAQ about the conduct of the BRM on Nov 15, http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0932.htm – check para 6.8: "If votes are taken at the BRM, who votes? >Those present."
>
>Paragraphs 6.5 and 6.6 (rather confusingly, for a document titled to be about the BRM) talk about O or P status remaining fixed as at the September vote, but it’s in a section titled >"Voting" which seems to describe the ballot process as a whole. So for votes at the BRM, it seems P or O membership is as per September, but as anyone at the meeting can >vote, membership status is therefore irrelevant. I think…
I can’t follow your argument.
Let’s us check what 6.5 really says
"6.5 What voting status will NBs have?
For voting at the BRM, and in the ongoing DIS 29500 ballot the voting status (either “P” member or “O” member) is fixed as per the result of the 2 September letter ballot."
This FAQ entry does without doubt indicate that P and O status matter to the BRM since their status is fixed as per the 2 Sep latter ballot.
6.8 Futher explains that all attending can vote…but if O and P status matter then the only logical conclusion is that the normal directives for O and P status apply. In the september ballot both O and P participants could vote…but the rules give these votes different meaning. Going by those rules the BRM letter ballot failed.
It could happen that ISO has an extra document that makes special rules for this particular BRM, but why have this then not having been published when people question the voting rules? That no objections was heard about this at the BRM could easily be explained by the reports of the board just counting the number of objections instead of hearding them before they proceeded.
Alexander Brown probably thinks he followed procedure when he equalled O and P status…the things that matter is if the paper work match his oppinion.
One comment more:
Thanks god ISO JTC1 don’t deliver food and chemical standards.
What a way to make standards ! Keep the party
–Dario
Dario
I’m afraid that I’ve got some bad news for you about ISO . . .
– Andy
The following was submitted at Jason Matusow blog , responding his post "The Open XML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) Was An Unqualified Success" ( http://blogs.msdn.com/jasonmatusow/archive/2008/02/29/the-open-xml-ballot-resolution-meeting-brm-was-an-unqualified-success.aspx )
But never saw the light ( censored by Jason?, why? )
—–
"The DIS 29500 ballot resolution meeting (BRM) finished up in Geneva today and was an unqualified success by any measure. "
please specify which are the measures that compose the "any measure" set
"A few things need to be kept top of mind as national bodies solidify their position within the next 30 days:"
thanks to worry about NB mind, let see what are the things …
"A BRM is about technical work on the remaining open issues most important to participating national standards bodies"
first of all: BRM has gone… why are you telling NBs what is supposed they must know *before* the BRM. I believe that you are underestimating them.
This BRM was about discuss 3500 comments/observations detected during a few months of quick review of +6000 pages of a DIS, which were responsible of a "disapproval" of DIS 29500 in the september ballot.
"Many issues raised by national bodies can be addressed in advance of the BRM through the proposed dispositions of the submitting organization and, in some cases, discussions between the national bodies and the submitter. This happened with Open XML, where national bodies identified many issues that were addressed to their satisfaction before the BRM started."
if this were the case, why were there 18 abstentions in the BRM vote tally? ( http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080229055319727 )
"The BRM is an opportunity to discuss the remaining issues of importance to national bodies. "
according to reports ( Frank Farance, HOD of USA, Tim Bray, delegate from Canada and other mentioned in Andy post ), only 20 comments have been discussed. The amount of work required to address concerns with this proposed ISO standard was way beyond what such a large group could meaningfully address in the time allotted.
" * The convener, Alex Brown, with the help of ISO/IEC and SC34 officers, ran a very successful BRM."
please define "successful"
" * During the meeting, each delegation was given the opportunity to identify those issues most important to them thus defining the scope of work for the BRM. "
let each delegation affirm this ( speaking or voting in one month ), thank you
"The BRM focused on building consensus on significant remaining technical issues and, in many cases, resulted in modifications to the proposed dispositions to refine and
improve them."
let each delegation affirm this ( speaking or voting in one month ), thank you
" * By the end of the BRM, national bodies were able to consider for their approval each proposed disposition.
The vast majority of those proposed dispositions were adopted, resulting in a better specification that will better meet the interests of national bodies and the broader community."
how many delegations voted for approve this "vast majority" of proposed dispositions? six over thirty two for example? ( http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080229055319727 )
"Extensive steps were taken within the last year to improve Open XML through work with national standards bodies (and their participants) within the inclusive framework of ISO/IEC processes."
let each delegation affirm this ( speaking or voting in one month ), thank you
" * The Project Editor and Ecma TC-45 reached out to NSBs for ongoing input to the disposition process. Their valuable input was influential in the generation of the dispositions and that is why such overwhelmingly positive consensus was achieved
during the BRM. "
i would have preferred that ECMA TC 45 ( and Microsoft specially ) did their homework previous to submitting DIS 29500, this is the "spirit" of fast-tracking: to fast-review a mature draft standard , not to make rushed, massive and not reviewed changes.
" * Conference calls, meetings, progress reports, early postings of dispositions, the full report on Jan 14…all of this was done as the groundwork for the BRM. And this was on top of the preceding 7 months of extensive technical engagement by the working groups and committees within the NSBs."
i see this "progress reports" as an "artifact" of the work. Do you think that NBs around the world have *all* the time to work with you to correct this DIS?
What is needed is that you ( ECMA and Microsoft ) submit a "final" text , so NB can review it and finally disaprove ( or approve it ). Still today, this text is not available at http://www.ecma-international.org/dis29500_brm/
" Because of this, there were no "surprise" issue to be dealt with."
may be the surprise were the +6000 pages of the initial draft and the +2000 page of the dispositions and the scarce time to review it ( see the following Tim Bray [ one of the fathers of XML ] post and search the word "frightening" : http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/02/29/BRM-narrative )
" And without question, the specification was improved based on the diligent feedback of NSBs from around the world. "
i would have preferred that ECMA TC 45 ( and Microsoft specially ) did their homework previous to submitting DIS 29500, this is the "spirit" of fast-tracking: to fast-review a mature draft standard , not to make rushed, massive and not reviewed changes.
"A BRM is successful if it produces technical improvements to the specification to address comments raised during the ballot phase."
without rushing and with a reasonable timeframe, keeping the quality of the deliverables
" * There were no "surprises" or "new comments" during this process. Every issue addressed was the result of the past 2+ years of work on the specification, and in particular the past 5 months of intensive work leading into the BRM."
not agree, the last "draft" was published five days ago ( 22/02/2008 ) and still is provisional
" * During the course of the meeting, much effort was put forward in order to come to consensus on those issues that were the most heavily discussed over the duration of the past year. The types of issues discussed during the BRM are represented here. "
did NB reach consensus in this heavy issues?
" * The changes adopted (and denied) were based on consensus among all National Bodies. This is exactly how BRMs are meant to function. "
how many delegations composed this "consensus" six over thirty two NBs for example? ( http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080229055319727 )
"I’ll say it again – by any rational measure of ISO/IEC JTC 1 ballot resolution meetings, this one was a complete success."
do you think that repeating things can replace based argumentation?
"ISO/IEC standards are not only technically sound, but they should also be relevant to the marketplace."
not agree. In one month, NBs will have to answer ( with a vote ) the following question ( this was put it clear by Alex Brown, BRM convenor, on many blog posts ):
‘Has DIS 29500 the technical merits to become an ISO international standard?’
" * DIS 29500, as improved through the rigorous review of the past year and the decisions made by delegations during the BRM, is a specific ation that meets both bars of technical quality and marketplace relevance."
too much PR here, i will no comment on this paragraph, sorry
" * Independent implementations of the specification are already available on most major operating systems platforms and in hundreds of applications. The statement that Open XML is about a single vendor is specious and empirically false."
please provide % of conformance of each of this implementations
" * Open XML has brought more attention to, and interest in, international standardization than any specification in the history of the ICT industry."
could be true. Do you know *all* the specifications in the history of the ICT industry? i admire your knowledge
" The reason for this is simple – greater openness in all document formats (not just Open XML) is a good thing for everyone.
There is general recognition that there will be broad adoption of this format around the world. Open XML delivers on that promise and is part of the rich ecosystem of open ??> document formats that are driving this issue forward."
too much PR here, i will no comment on this paragraph, sorry
"At the end of the day, customers should be able to choose the format(s) that best meet their needs and should not be told which technology to use. Open XML, as improved through the hard work of national bodies over the past year, is an attractive
alternative for them."
this has nothing to do with DIS 29500 fast-tracking process. I repeat:
In one month, NBs will have to answer ( with a vote ) the following question ( this was put it clear by Alex Brown, BRM convenor, on many blog posts ):
‘Has DIS 29500 the technical merits to become an ISO international standard?’
"There was an unprecedented number of delegations from national standards bodies that came to Geneva and participated in the BRM. I have the utmost respect for the contributions from all of the national bodies (P-members and O-members alike). "
Would Microsoft send a check to reward all the work of this national standards bodies ?
"The result of this week’s discussions, by any reasonable measure, has greatly improved the specification and produced a great result. "
let each delegation affirm this ( speaking or voting in one month ), thank you
"The BRM was a complete success "
please define success.
"congratulations to all who were involved with it."
thank you
–Orlando Marcello
Andy hi
To follow up on our exchange above …
I must thank you for your kind words — but this is not personal, or a question of friendliness (I’m sure you are a lovely chap), but a question of accuracy and ethics.
Your headline has now transitioned from being "not even wrong" to "wrong". If you want to fix it you should remove the words "fail to". However, since this is not then a very on-message headline for you I suggest maybe you should have something like "OOXML still in flux as clock ticks down" or "BRM performs emergency surgery on OOXML in desperate rescue attempt" or some such.
I think it is wrong for you to claim your original headline was some kind of necessary counterbalance to Jason Matusow’s: his was predictably on-message (from the MS POV), yours was (and is) factually misleading.
Also, by my records Charles Schulz was not a BRM delegate as you categorize him.
You then raise several points about the adequacy of the Fast Track process. Fair enough; no comment. On the particular questions about in-meeting voting I can tell you:
OBVIOUSLY (given the red hot controversy here) voting procedure was discussed in minute detail, and decided, in consultation with ITTF before the BRM started. I (as somebody primarily used to SC participation, rather than fast tracking) had some un-learning to do, and I think some other commentators do too. If a country has a complaint it can appeal formally — that (rather than wittering to the press) is the correct way to do it.
You then turn to the question of what votes "mean". Rather than venturing further into the mental maze you have made for yourself, let’s take an actual example and work it through.
Consider a very simple and uncontroversial Response, no. 637. This concerned a comment raised by AFNOR (France) that noted an "extraneous square bracket at the end of [a] line". AFNOR’s suggested solution was "remove the extraneous square bracket."
Ecma’s proposed response to this was to edit the text to remove the square bracket.
Now, this is just a PROPOSED resolution; in order to make it into the DIS text (unchanged since Jan 2007) it HAS TO be blessed by the BRM. BRM delegations can take one of three positions on Ecma’s proposed response. They can:
A key point here is that if no decision is taken, nothing happens. In other words, if no decision is taken the text stays in its original state.
Now imagine you are a NB considering voting on Response 637 — Andy, what would you have voted for in this case? And would you have been happy not to be able to take any decision at all because of time constraints?
Now multiply this process by 800 and you’ll know what voting was. For added realism, try staying awake all night, and wearing this: http://www.cafepress.com/freesociety.234283639 (thanks to the Portuguese delegation).
The voting form also had boxes for registering an overall position, purely as a labour-saving device. So if (for example) you as an NB approved 700 responses and disapproved 100, you could simply record an overall position of "approve" and then mark the 100 disapproved comments as "exceptions" to your overall vote. To save typing, many NBs (as Inigo Surguy has noted above) simply recorded an overall position of "abstain" and then recorded the exceptions to that position. Your reading of significance into the way this overall position was recorded is about as sensible as reading significance into whether NBs user uppercase of lowercase “X” characters on their voting form!
Finally, I deplore your mention of the Nuremburg Defence (“only following orders”) in relation to my role as convenor. Invoking the Holocaust (however indirectly) as a suitable parallel to a document format standardization project shows a total failure of perspective.
– Alex.
"OBVIOUSLY (given the red hot controversy here) voting procedure was discussed in minute detail, and decided, in consultation with ITTF before the BRM started."
Why weren’t the ballot papers given to the NBs days before the BRM so that they could fill them in in a less rushed manner?
This would have allowed significantly more time to discuss specifics at the meeting.
(Since it has been reported that almost a day was spent discussing the mechanics of the ballot).
Alex, the reply I made to a previous post is more appropriate here so I’ll restate it:
“In all the different (political) meetings I’ve ever been in as either a participant or a chairman, it was customary for the chairman to draw up the agenda for a meeting according to the following rules:
1) schedule proposals on which the decision is a formality (to do away with stuff that can be implemented) and decide on them right away
2) then do a tally of the remaining proposals and draw up a schedule on what needs to be discussed
3) suggest (controversial) proposals where a large number of the participants indicate their urge to be heard to be taken off-line, either to resolve them by the end of the meeting or at a later date.
4) schedule proposals with little comments to be handled first.
Alex, as far as I can tell the way you approached this BRM is the exact opposite of what I described above and (as you indicate yourself) in the end leaves a lot of room for interpreting the meaning of the votes on the comments not being discussed.
With 20-20 hindsight, would you have chosen a different approach to the BRM, for example with the (universally) tried and tested method I described here?”
The example you mention about the loose bracket AFNOR stumbled upon to me is a prime example of a proposal on which the decision is a formality. Would it have been too much work to lump the resulting dispositions together and be done with them at the beginning of the BRM?
For that matter, how many BRMs have there been in the (recorded) history of ISO where more than 1000 dispositions needed to be addressed? Doesn’t that (presumably) low number flag this BRM as something special, where special measures need to be taken in order to keep it manageable in order to send a CLEAR signal to all NBs who need to vote in the next days to come?
In fact, several of these approaches were taken. A batch of c. 200 "easies" (typos and the like) were adopted as a group (that’s where most of the 20% of resolved issues can be found). Many issues were also taken off line just as you suggest. Rob Weir’s post describes this in some detail.
So while the final result may still not have been satisfactory in the end, in fact Alex did many of the things that you are suggesting.
– Andy
To do away beforehand with dispositions that common sense dictates to be non-controversial would have shed some light on the amount of time needed to resolve the remaining issues, and taking the most controversial dispositions off-line immediately would have freed up more time for the dispositions where little discussion was expected to be necessary.
From http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/sc34/open/0933draft-rev2.htm I got the distinct impression the agenda wasn’t set up with that prioritisation in mind (and that’s what I’m suggesting):
"The convenor thanks those NBs who have informally indicated to him their highest-priority comments and responses. Taking the variety of these into account, and the partial nature of the response, the convenor has decided it would be counter-productive to prescribe an order of discussion in the agenda. Instead NBs will be invited to speak by the convenor in the meeting sessions, and the convenor will thus ensure NBs can enjoy fair representation over the course of the meeting by granting them permission to speak in alphabetical order, making as many passes over the delegations as time allows."
Of course that’s a draft agenda, so until the audio recordings are released for public scrutiny we’ll have a hard time finding out, won’t we?
The abstain meaning is wrong.
Many NB use abstain to indicate we can’t vote for this but we don’t want to embarrass anyone over this either.
Now that you understand that let’s look at those votes again 6 for, 4 against, majority abstain. Vote fails; didn’t obtain consensus for the changes.
BRM should report out that it worked a small fraction of the issues, managed to get a number of improvements voted on to make to DIS 29500. However, on an overall vote the BRM could not recommend the results to be standardized. Based on progress made at the meeting it would take at least a year to get to the point where a majority of the members would vote in approval.
Based on this, we would suggest that no additional vote be taken, and the issue referred to the maintainers/enhancers (OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC) of ISO/IEC 26300 for consolidation in that standard.
If MS had done this in the first place no one would be in this current predicament. MS knew this but chose to attempt to take a short-cut through ECMA. Well, that was a bad decision, now they have to go back do things the right way. Too bad.] Further, ECMA needs to be stripped of their fast path in ISO, until they fix their standards process so that it represents all sides (not just some big producers). ECMA should have coordinated with OASIS on this standard, their failure to do so is reason enough to strip them in this case (we can cite that this is not the first time for ECMA to have serious problems with a standard at ISO).
Minor details aside, this is exactly what I was suggesting:
This would have been, to my mind, much more useful and harder to be misrepresented.
– Andy
I don’t see it being addressed anywhere, was a single resolution for the following agenda item voted on? (In other words was a single closing resolution made and voted on to prepare the revised text according to the resolutions made during the BRM? If not there is no new text and no vote should be taken – fast track is over, as BRM did not come to a resolution.)
The output of the Ballot Resolution Meeting shall be a single resolution that instructs the Project Editor to prepare a revised text. The resolution shall list the changes that the meeting has decided on.
Interesting question – but I don’t know the answer.
– Andy
I also asked Robert Weir and replied on his blog stating "There was no vote on that final resolution."
I think I’d like to meet the person who the meeting adjourned before that issue came up. What was he thinking?!! Without that issue being resolved, I don’t think the BRM voted to issue a revised text. As I see it, no revised text means no resolution was achieved at the BRM. No resolution means exit fast track procedures and no voting is needed, DIS29500 will have to go some other route to standardization.
"Finally, I deplore your mention of the Nuremburg Defence (“only following orders”) in relation to my role as convenor. Invoking the Holocaust (however indirectly) as a suitable parallel to a document format standardization project shows a total failure of perspective."
Yes, it does. It is important to be responsible.
I fully understand that the adoption of the ECMA dispositions is a matter of good pragmatism.
Alex,
Thanks once again for responding. I think that from my point of view we’re probably getting close to the "agree to disagree" point (assuming that you’re willing to cut me that much slack), so let me start with the central point where I don’t think that one of use is likely to convince the other, as there may be some benefit to that. I’ll then go on to your individual points.
The main point at the 30,000 foot level is that I don’t think that the implications of allowing the Fast Track process to be used on such a large and insufficiently prepared format can be separated from the impact that this decision had on every stage of the process, and most especially on the BRM. It was this decision that placed you and everyone else in the BRM in the impossible position that you found yourself in.
Taking this down to ground level: I have just read Rob Weir’s piece, and its recital of "no time" decisions notwithstanding several objecting hands in the air, the "newbies" from NBs struggling with language issues and what was going on, the inability of NB’s to advance objections (I have personally received a number of emails from delegates flagging further proposals that they were unable to get heard), the accounts I have personally received from delegations saying that it was impossible to go more than a small way through such a long list in so little time, and so on, all of which I heard first hand from people when I was in Geneva as well.
I cannot square this with any confidence that the decisions made under the ballot will be good technical decisions. While I do not question the right of those in the room to have made the decision, I do not accept that this decision may not be questioned by whoever is troubled by it. I have written before and I am sure will be writing again that I think that the integrity of the de jure standard setting process is taking a terrible beating as a result of the OOXML experience – and this in an organization that created the ISO 9000 series!
I am, of course, also particularly disturbed by the lack of transparency, which, absent stories like my own and the willingness of delegates to speak could lead people to have greater confidence in the results than I believe is warranted. As you know, there will be tremendous pressure brought to bear on NBs all around the world. Unless they have more public facts to point to, they will be defenseless to resist pressure to approve OOXML, whether they are as disturbed with quality issues or not.
Alex, I understand and respect your dedication to accomplish the job to which you were appointed. I don’t think that it would be fair for me to expect that you, as Convenor, should have attempted to declare a failure of the BRM to complete its task. But I do think that the delegates collectively would have better served the process had they voted earlier in the process to declare that they could not complete their job. That’s where you and I will certainly differ, so on this point I think we need to agree to disagree, as each of us is entitled to his opinion.
Now, on to your individual points.
Alex: Your headline has now transitioned from being "not even wrong" to "wrong". If you want to fix it you should remove the words "fail to". However, since this is not then a very on-message headline for you I suggest maybe you should have something like "OOXML still in flux as clock ticks down" or "BRM performs emergency surgery on OOXML in desperate rescue attempt" or some such.
Andy: If you and I were having this discussion before I posted the blog entry, I would have had no particular objection to "OOXML still in flux as clock ticks down," but at this point I think that it isn’t honest for me to keep tinkering with a title that has already been read and linked to by so many people. I think the text and comments together will give a clear picture. I also think that a really accurate title that we could both agree on would have to be more like the following, but it would be a little long:
That said, if we can agree on the above, I will add it in at the top of the text by way of an update and indicate our consensus on it.
Alex: I think it is wrong for you to claim your original headline was some kind of necessary counterbalance to Jason Matusow’s: his was predictably on-message (from the MS POV), yours was (and is) factually misleading.
Andy: I think that we’re spending too many words on the title, but that’s just my opinion. When someone reads the text, I believe that the meaning of the title becomes clear., and I doubt that many people will read the title at my blog and not the article. Note also that the blog entry you are talking about, while based on data, also clearly was as much an editorial as a fact piece, and this would hardly be a title that would be inappropriate on an editorial page where projecting message and point of view is the purpose of a title. All that said, I accept that you didn’t like it, and I have already clarified it.
Alex: Also, by my records Charles Schulz was not a BRM delegate as you categorize him.
Andy: Right you are. I corrected this not long before you posted your comment.
Alex: You then raise several points about the adequacy of the Fast Track process. Fair enough; no comment. On the particular questions about in-meeting voting I can tell you:
OBVIOUSLY (given the red hot controversy here) voting procedure was discussed in minute detail, and decided, in consultation with ITTF before the BRM started. I (as somebody primarily used to SC participation, rather than fast tracking) had some un-learning to do, and I think some other commentators do too. If a country has a complaint it can appeal formally — that (rather than wittering to the press) is the correct way to do it.
Andy: I don’t have any concerns over whether the 900 vote was within the rules or not. Others may, but that’s not the issue to me, so I’m fine with all of this. As indicated earlier, the big issue for me isn’t whether deciding to vote on all 900 was a good idea. Clearly, those in the room thought it was, and that’s fine. But it’s also perfectly fine for those outside the meeting, as with any other political process, to state that they think that it was a bad decision.
Alex: You then turn to the question of what votes "mean". Rather than venturing further into the mental maze you have made for yourself, let’s take an actual example and work it through.
Consider a very simple and uncontroversial Response, no. 637. This concerned a comment raised by AFNOR (France) that noted an "extraneous square bracket at the end of [a] line". AFNOR’s suggested solution was "remove the extraneous square bracket."
Ecma’s proposed response to this was to edit the text to remove the square bracket.
Now, this is just a PROPOSED resolution; in order to make it into the DIS text (unchanged since Jan 2007) it HAS TO be blessed by the BRM. BRM delegations can take one of three positions on Ecma’s proposed response. They can:
A key point here is that if no decision is taken, nothing happens. In other words, if no decision is taken the text stays in its original state.
Now imagine you are a NB considering voting on Response 637 — Andy, what would you have voted for in this case? And would you have been happy not to be able to take any decision at all because of time constraints?
Now multiply this process by 800 and you’ll know what voting was. For added realism, try staying awake all night, and wearing this: http://www.cafepress.com/freesociety.234283639 (thanks to the Portuguese delegation).
The voting form also had boxes for registering an overall position, purely as a labour-saving device. So if (for example) you as an NB approved 700 responses and disapproved 100, you could simply record an overall position of "approve" and then mark the 100 disapproved comments as "exceptions" to your overall vote. To save typing, many NBs (as Inigo Surguy has noted above) simply recorded an overall position of "abstain" and then recorded the exceptions to that position. Your reading of significance into the way this overall position was recorded is about as sensible as reading significance into whether NBs user uppercase of lowercase “X” characters on their voting form!
Andy: First, while I appreciate you going into this much detail (which is helpful), I think that we start going sideways when we get down to this level of detail. I’ve had email from delegates who said that they didn’t have close to enough time to get close to getting half way done, making these finer distinctions, in my view, often academic in the breach. If the ballot had gone out a week before the BRM, I agree that all of this would be more relevant.
Alex: Finally, I deplore your mention of the Nuremburg Defence (“only following orders”) in relation to my role as convenor. Invoking the Holocaust (however indirectly) as a suitable parallel to a document format standardization project shows a total failure of perspective.
Andy: Noted. The phrase is a useful shorthand for saying that one puts the appointed task ahead of the consequences, and points to the rules to show why those consequences should not be taken into account. Everyone in the course of their life is likely to be placed in a situation where they can choose to follow the rules, or to refuse to do so when they think that the situation at hand is a square peg to a round hole of rules. Different people will make different decisions when they find themselves in such a situation. It did not occur to me yesterday, but there is another phrase, this time from the 1960’s, that I could have used instead: "If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem."
In my view, the BRM delegates lost sight of the possible consequences, repeatedly saying, "This is not the venue where other than technical details can be discussed," and then even failed to take the consequences into account in the area of its appointed purview. The result is that it lent its authority to the result by adopting a mechanism that was – in my opinion – not a responsible decision, although undisputably well-intentioned. You are asking me to take responsibility for my decisions in writing my (equally well-intentioned) blog entry, and I am simply doing the same with respect to the decision of the delegates.
Once again, I do thank you for taking the time to post your comments here, and I do think that it will help concerned individuals to have more insight into the decision making that went on inside the room. While I respect that you did not like the way in which our dialogue came to happen, I hope you will agree that where we have ended up may have a useful purpose in supplementing public understanding of a stressful process.
Best regards,
– Andy
I can sympathize with Alex, having been the chair of JEDEC’s JC-16 committee for eight years. JEDEC, please note, is one of the "industry consortia" that generally claim less rigorous standards than ISO does. I can, therefore, offer some comparisons that may or may not be germane.
Quite a few of our processes are recognizably related, such as the four-way ballot options of "yes,yes with comments, no with comments, abstain." In particular, I will focus on our post-ballot meeting protocol. Rather than the ISO process where a passing letter ballot is automatically adopted, we always hold a post-ballot meeting to finalize the process and pass successful ballots to the Board of Directors for process review. In that meeting, our rules require that all comments must be addressed. Upon review of the voting and comments, the Committee votes on resolution of the ballot. Simple editorial corrections (e.g. duplicate right bracket) may be adopted only by unanimous agreement that they are, in fact, only editorial. The corrected ballot is then voted on to be passed to the BOD — or not. To be clear, a letter ballot that fails by the numbers is dead, but even one which passes may still fail in open committee based on the comments made during balloting.
Again, all comments made during balloting must be addressed. Unanimity is, of course, not always possible; in fact, in my experience it is very rare. However, even a "losing" position deserves a fair hearing. Beyond fairness, sometimes the minority is just plain right and we are, after all, professionals. I have seen, on more than one occasion, a ballot accepted by a ballot of 40:1 or more killed dead by one comment which the Committee agreed outweighed the rest. In the end, our rules require that every comment requires a hearing and until it has its fair hearing and consideration the balloted material cannot proceed without consensus that the comment has been addressed. For what it’s worth, our usual committee vote asks if any are opposed and only if there is opposition is a count taken.
My understanding is that ISO rules have similar "must be considered" requirements. If so, we interpret them differently because although I have seen attempts to short-circuit the process in JEDEC committees they never succeeded. The fact that ISO requires so much less of itself does not, in my opinion, speak at all well of it as an organization.
D. C. Sessions
lumbercartel.com is my domain; dcs is my account
Reference: JEDEC Manual of Procedure, JM-21: http://www.jedec.org/Home/manuals/JM21M.pdf
D.C.,
I really appreciate people with your experience leaving comments like this. It’s very difficult for people who haven’t been part of the process to know what’s reasonable and what isn’t, taking all relevant factors into account, or even what normative practices are. It’s very helpful when people with solid experience in the trenches share their knowledge with everyone else.
– Andy
If I understand it correctly, we have the following:
– The ballots for the mass vote saved for the last day were prepared ahead of time, Yes?
– Some people, but not the NB HoDs, knew of this plan and sanctioned the pre planned rule change, Yes?
– The voting choices created for this one-time event allowed "Not Yes" votes to be split three ways, Yes?
– The endgame was presented to the "participants", at the last possible moment, w/ no discussion, Yes?
– 800 + issues were "resolved" by "consensus" as the one way to vote "yes" got more votes then any individual way to vote "no"
Given the above (assuming its true) what information is available to Citizens to understand how the whole meeting was not well planned for for exactly this "80% issues resolved PR outcome"?
Who designed the ballot? When? Why? Who "approved"?
When early-in-the-week procedural questions were raised, or attempted to be raised, did those in charge of the rules know that the endgame was already defined?
What is their relationship to ECMA & Microsoft?
–tom
Tom, you’re starting from the assumption that this was not the result of committee discussion. Too many attendees have told us that they did discuss this approach and it was decided, by consensus, that it was the least evil of a bad situation.
There’s enough grief going around here without adding gratuitous tin-foil hat stuff.
Tom, if you click on the delegate links collected at the end of the blog entry you’ll find several accounts (Rob Weir’s, as I recall, covers this in pretty good detail) that track the discussion on this point. "Batch voting" was proposed by Alex Brown at his blog in advance as a possibility, but I have no information or reason to think it went beyond that.
– Andy
> "Batch voting" was proposed by Alex Brown at his blog in advance as a possibility, but I have no information or reason to think it went beyond that.
Andy, I suppose you are the same Andy that usually post under "Admin", please remember Alex has posted this admission in a comment on this very blog.
———————
You then raise several points about the adequacy of the Fast Track process. Fair enough; no comment. On the particular questions about in-meeting voting I can tell you:
OBVIOUSLY (given the red hot controversy here) voting procedure was discussed in minute detail, and decided, in consultation with ITTF before the BRM started.
Yes, I am the same "Andy" that has signed every "Admin" comment at this blog (a/k/a my blog, where I am also the Admin). I’m not sure what your point is, though. They chose the "route," not came up with the idea, which Alex had discussed earlier at his blog, where you can check it out.
– Andy
Thanks Andy. I really like your blog, and this article is very informative.
I am the same anonymous poster as in the grand-parent post. My point was to support the original poster that suggested Alex Brown and ITTF could have been more forthcoming about the paper voting at the beginning of the BRM instead of waiting until Wednesday. They knew that was in the plan having discussed it in details and the lack of time issue was very predictable. Then the NBs delegation could have had more time to come up with some more palatable alternative. The way things were managed, the NBs were put in an awkward position. If they complain, they are being told "this was your choice, bear with it" to boot.
Yes, I see your point. It does seem strange and unfortunate that more concrete planning wasn’t done in advance – and particularly because if it had, the realization might have hit home that a one-week BRM was a hopeless exercise and not worth attempting at all, unless many more days, perhaps spread over some months, were dedicated to the effort instead.
– Andy
I am the same anonymous again.
Andy you must be a kind man to bring up such a charitable explanation.
My opinion is the problem was obvious all along and there is no way Alex and ITTS could have miss it short of gross incompetence (which I don’t believe). For some reason they think their duty is to make this pig fly no matter what and to achieve this goal, they pretend it is not a pig and it did fly just fine. The lack of minutes, recording and outside attendance serves no useful purpose other than making sure there is no record that can contradict this fiction. I think everything was intentional and went according to plan but for one thing. They didn’t anticipate information leaking through bloggers.
I too have noticed that Andy will write based on making the most forgiving of assumptions, and I both appreciate giving people the benefit of the doubt, and giving the reader what they need to draw their own conclusions :-).
So, a thought experiment: Assuming the very best in all people involved, and lets assume no rule changes where made before the BRM.
Now, to this interested observer, the rules appear to allow for "No consensus reached" as an outcome, or:
"The NB Consensus is that a one week BRM fine tuning process is
insufficient by 45 times ( 900 / 20) for this proposal, and that is
a clear indication that the details are not ready (regardless of
issues of duplication), therefore Fast Track is inappropriate"
(apologies for any off base assumptions baked into the following questions)
Why was something like the above not given some sort of hearing/vote/discussion?
Why, for a gathering of organizations that strive to be process-centric, not outcome-centric as a means of assuring quality work, was "Stop, pick a more appropriate process" not an option?
— Tom (OP)
The whole thing just makes ISO look bad. That any one company can so obviously skew the process to push such a big standard through a fast track process is bad enough. That ISO would even let such a large standard with so many comments try to be resolved by a single week BRM is quite laughable.
Laughable but not funny. It is simply sad that so much time and effort and public money is being wasted in dealing with this abuse of of the organisation. One that is there presumably to serve the needs of ALL interested parties, not just a single company.
Will it even really matter in the end? If the company pushes this through the system they may get a few more years out of their monopoly, but an ISO mark doesn’t make a rubbish standard a golden one. And neither is it any guarantee of success in the marketplace.
Michael
I have written a number of comments at Groklaw, using the username of "E-man". I have no particular connection to ISO or Groklaw or any of the parties involved with the OOXML specification. Perhaps you have seen my comments at Groklaw, though.
As you are no doubt aware, Pamela Jones wrote an article largely based on your blog entry. I was very disappointed with your blog entry as it was originally written and wrote a number of comments at Groklaw that reflect this. Since you are interested in receiving comments here, I will try to write directly to you this time. (Actually, I also commented anonymously about a math error that was quickly fixed.)
It should have been obvious that problems caused by what you wrote here were likely to be propagated far beyond your blog. Many people at Groklaw seem to have been confused about what happened at the BRM, and I lay at least some of the blame for this at your doorstep. At the same time you deserve credit for what you have helped them understand.
I note that you have made some changes to the article. Thank you for doing that. I think it is much improved. Unfortunately, I doubt corrections will as noticed or propagate as well as the original text. One relatively minor thing that might help would be to call attention to the fact that you changed the title. That change is not mentioned under the March 02 updates (I think that’s when you made the change), yet it is certainly as significant, in my opinion, as the changes you listed.
Actually, I’m still not satisfied that the title is accurate; how about "Most OOXML Dispositions Not Even Discussed at BRM" if you don’t like Dr. Brown’s ideas? While I am at it, I don’t think the word "and" should be in the second sentence where you describe the the March 02 updates – that’s just a matter of grammar, but it did confuse me for a while.
The remaining complaints that I still have about your blog entry, but which you have not yet addressed, involves your tabulation of "votes" and the text near your table. What you were doing, if my understanding is at all accurate, is using default values for the ballot as proxies for ~900 votes that were officially cast. (The tilde indicates the value is approximate.) That the default value was simply intended as a means to cast a large number of votes easily and that you were using the same default value as an estimate or approximation of how ~900 votes were officially cast is hardly clear from what you wrote. Certainly many of the comments at Groklaw indicated that the authors missed those points. I think you should have made much more clear that the table was not a table of actual votes.
It appears that many people didn’t understand your explanation of the default value for the votes. Compounding that, when you begin using the default value as a proxy or an estimate, you didn’t really announce that fact, and as a result people became very confused and misunderstood what was going on, I think.
The labels you used in your table indicate that you tabulated results for actual votes, which is not the case. One column you have labled "All Votes". Actually, that is "All NBs" or "All Default Values". Likewise, you have a row labeled "Total votes cast". Actually, the total votes officially cast would be ~900 times those figures, given that there were ~900 dispositions on the ballot, so again, the label should be "Total NBs voting" or something like that.
You also describe the table’s contents as: "The final tally (as recorded by participants, and subject to final confirmation)", as if it were something to be officially tallied as part of the BRM process. Can you blame people for interpreting it that way if you don’t don’t make it obvious that they shouldn’t? Unless I’m very wrong about something, it was you who decided to draw conclusions based on the default values. No doubt others trying to get an early understanding of the voting did the same, but I very much doubt ISO has approved doing that.
I am also concerned, for a somewhat different reason, with this statement about the ballots: "On Friday, the ballots came back. Some contained votes on a small number of dispositions and some adopted the default option for all of the listed dispositions." How accurately (and completely) does that describe how all NBs voted? It is important to know that in order to understand the usefulness of the default value as a proxy for the ~900 votes. It is particularly significant in this situation because the number of cases where "approve" was the default value was so close to the number of cases were "disapprove" was the default.
I realize that you talked to some delegates who were actually at the BRM. The question is: Were they telling you what all NBs had done, or were they telling you what almost all NBs had done? I find it hard to believe that there weren’t at least a few cases where the NBs arrived at the BRM already knowing how they were wanted to vote on any dispositions that weren’t changed at the BRM, who liked (or disliked) a significant number of dispositions, but took a different position on a significant number of other ones, and who then applied those votes when it was time to cast the ~900 votes.
My expectations seem to be confirmed by the data that someone has anonymously posted in your comments. That data supposedly indicates how the NBs voted on all votes, as I understand it. If that information is accurate, even if it includes votes other than the ~900 that you are talking about, your statement certainly does not describe how Brazil and Switzerland cast their votes and it is questionable with respect to a couple of other NBs, as well. So, despite what you may have been told, I don’t think that your statement describes the way all NBs voted.
I know it is difficult to describe how the vote was taken and how you are using the default values and how people should interpret the results. I’ve tried doing that myself, and am not terribly impressed with what I’ve managed to come up with, either. (There are things that I wrote in Groklaw’s comments that I certainly would change if I were permitted to edit them.) Also, I know there is only so much you can do with respect to how people will interpret and use what you write, but in this case I think much of the misinterpretation was predictable. Frankly, some of it wasn’t misinterpretation at all – your title did say (originally) that OOXML was rejected at the BRM. Naturally, my comments at Groklaw reflect you blog as it was written at the time.
I appreciate the new material you have added and the changes you have already made to what was originally written, I still think you can make it better, though. Please consider what I have said here.
Regards,
E-man
Wow ! I just read your comment and wonder whether you understand the conditions under which it was written.
Andy was trying to get as much valid information as possible as soon as possible because experience has apparently taught him that whenever Microsoft’s interests are involved, the MS astro-turf machine will pre-prepare and pre-approve blog entries waiting only for some preliminary numbers from those MS employees that actually attended as delegates.
Witness the accuracy of his predictions by the way that Jason Matusow was able to blog misleadingly about the results of the BRM as early as Friday evening (Friday Afternoon Pacific Time). The only way he could get any numbers or results at all to use in presenting any semblance of authenticity (and that appears to be all he’s got) is to have been fed BRM results either during the BRM or immediately after the BRM from those MS employees that attended.
I give Andy unrestrained kudos for his ability to put the original blog post together in a VERY short time to refute the FUD that Jason Matusow and other MS mouthpieces had already published and in so doing he gave those that choose to fight for sanity in standards some amount of truth about the real picture that is only now emerging from the BRMto use in countering that FUD. You only have to look at how this blog has changed due to updated information that is intentionally sought out and actively elicited. While I recognize (and agree) that your comments are valid in hindsight, even you did not have all the details correct on Friday when you posted your original information on Groklaw. Even now, I have several questions outstanding such as "Jason M. says the large number of dispositions passed with a clear majority. I question that because I think most sane people would take the ‘majority to mean "of those in the room that vote". By that definition, the ‘clear majority’ abstained. However Alex Brown chooses to read this otherwise – to include allowing O-Members to vote which may be a clear violation of JTC rules. Of course if ‘majority’ is redefined from "of those casting yes/no votes only" to "of those in the room", the outcome of the BRM is MUCH MUCH different and then jives MUCH more closely with Andy’s original blog post.
Unfortunately, while you take potshots at Andy’s accuracy, Jason Matusow, Brian Jones (a US delegate to the BRM) and others are producing as much marketing malarky as they can before the SC34 results are officially released. I for one am not aware of any other place on the web where accurate info about the BRM is being collected other than here. It’s even become clear that Alex Brown has done what he can (intentionally or otherwise) to assist Microsoft in maintaining their document lock-in by lending his credibility to BRM results being interpreted and and published as fact on the internet, in mainstream press, and in the minds of politicians and enterprise management in the way that MS wants them published without waiting for any official results to be tallied, for final drafts to be written, or for the expected appeals to be filed/resolved. Meanwhile, those that care about the truth are hand-tied by lack of information other than that found here and what information continues to come in from other delegates.
All that having been said, I note (on my own nickel) that Andy has a typo in the article where he refers to BRM as BRT. (text search would be the easy way to find it Andy).
I’d also like to thank Andy and Rob Weir for their efforts to get out first word to try to counter the MS BS machine that’s already proclaiming complete victory. I truly hope that BRM members file appeals against the votes that gave no time for review, that allowed O-Members in clear violation of the written JTC rules, and that defined an ‘abstention’ as a ‘non-vote’ and that apparently ignored a large number of abstentions in order to claim that most (all?) edits not discussed passed and were approved. One thing I still don’t understand though, is why those countries that voted ‘yes with comments’ were allowed to participate and raise issues that no doubt took up valuable time at the BRM when they’d already voted yes. This should have disqualified the US, Poland, and I’m sure a few others that voted blanket yes and would have seriously changed the outcome of the BRM votes as well as the resulting DIS edits.
Perhaps Alex might address this question the next time he stops by ?
Thanks again Andy ! This is invaluable information – made even more valuable by being early and by increasing its accuracy ! …and thanks ESPECIALLY for keeping it real and not succumbing to the misinformation and marketing spin that MS & their agents continue to try to insert into your blog.
— Ed
Ed,
Thanks very much for the support. Yes, it was a very hectic week. I got no sleep on the way to Geneva (can’t sleep on planes) and was working (keeping up with client work), presenting or in meetings every day from 7:00 AM to 11:00 (Thursday I took the train to a client meeting in France). Friday night I was catching up and communicating with folks till 3:00 AM.
Necessarily on Friday I was dealing with information as it came in and trying to figure out what to make of it. The only real mistake I made of significance – and one I regret – was interpreting the "abstain" votes as rejecting the process. In fact, as the piece now reads, it was an effort by the delegates that chose this option to vote only on the dispositions they had a position on and say nothing about the rest. That’s not support for those dispositions, but it’s not appropriate to characterize that as "rejection" either. Only those that chose "disapprove" as a default option should properly be put in that category.
I was traveling home all day on Saturday and out of email contact for most of that time, so I was not able to make this change until I arrived home. Since then, I’ve been in touch with members of many delegations, and tried to update the blog as much as necessary, while not agreeing that the vote taken can fairly be taken as a majority approval, from a legitimacy as compared tio a procedural point of view, of the 900 dispositions that were put to a single ballot. That is simply more than I think can validly be said, given accounts (such as that from Greece) that some of those involved had never had time to read them all, and few if any (especially among the smaller delegations) had much time to consider and vote on them over night.
Turning to your question about attendance at the BRM: my recollection of the rules is that those who had voted against OOXML over the summer had a duty to attend, while those that voted otherwise had the right to attend. That’s not as illogical as it might sound, since changes (as Frank Farance has noted) can make things worse as well as better. So it seems fair to me that even though someone had voted to approve, under normal situations would have a right and a purpose to attending. Under the current circumstances, of course, the motivations for those that voted "yes" last summer and "yes" again at the BRM would be of interest.
I think that it’s particularly telling that the US delegation voted "no" as a default on the 900 dispositions at the BRM, notwithstanding the fact that the INCITS Executive Board members voted for the US last summer to adopt OOXML without any improvement at all.
– Andy
For the BRM to be successful at least 2/3 of the votes should be YES and no more than 1/4 of them NO. I’m certain that it failed be the first part doesn’t appear to be met (only 60% YES when only counting those who voted YES or NO, much less when counting abstains) and possibly the second part wasn’t met either (40% NO when only counting those who voted YES or NO).
The BRM chair should recommend referring the issue to OASIS TC for ODF. Further, he also needs to recommend that ISO look at stripping ECMA of its fast track ability. Only NBs should be allowed fast track and no one else.
I understand your passion, but I find nothing wrong in the points raised by E-Man or in his raising of those points, even as a person who has developed a strong bias against OOXML.
You are correct that Andy did as best he could to get out early and fast. But, it should be early, fast and accurate.
You point out more than once that MS will have marketing out in full force; that’s not surprising to anyone. But, "two wrongs don’t make a right". You don’t fight Microsoft falsehoods with opposing falsehoods. That’s a slippery slope that we currently see ISO using…
You only get one out of two:
1. Early = Fast.
2. Accurate on day one.
Andy’s blog appears to have become the center of this BRM hubub on the web. Probably because of his sincere search for truth (which is not always readily forthcoming when commercial interests trump common sense) or perhaps because he actively searches out multiple sources of information (by inviting others to post their experiences here).
I was reacting to E-Man’s apparent attack on Andy’ intentions and results which he was vigorously pursuing while relying on the benefits of 20/20 hindsight. Nothing more. I don’t disagree with his points, just his manner of delivery. In a perfect world, his arguments might even be fully valid. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect and we do the best we can.
There are things that are said in any early search for truth that are found to be inaccurate later. But credit should be given when those inaccuracies are corrected as soon as they are found. Andy gets credit. Microsoft does not (since they don’t accept corrections).
The BRM process just completed does not get credit. The individual delegates do (except for those that intentionally gamed the system such as the MS reps that also functioned as HOD in order to blanket-vote yes to all dispositions).
I’m still waiting for the formal tally to be released to see what is actually formally accepted and what is left standing after any appeals get made. I’m sure the NBs are also hesitant to commit to re-evaluating the spec since none but those in attendance even know what changes were vs were not approved and it sounds like even those in attendance may not have good information.
Question – how long after the BRM do the results get published so the NBs know what it is they are actually supposed to vote on between now and the end of March ?
–Ed
Ed,
You asked:
I _believe_ but can’t say for sure, given that this continues to be an unusual situation, is that Alex Brown is to do a Report of the Meeting (that may not be the exact title) that would go just to the NBs – I assume all 87 that will be entitled to vote. I don’t know whether there is a set format, or whether that’s up to the Convenor. I am told that this report can, but is not required, to be made public, but that’s from a committee member, not from ISO/IEC JTC1 itself.
I have no idea how long it will take for the dispositions to be turned into specification changes; perhaps Microsoft and Ecma might have already started on that before the BRM(?) If not, it’s hard for me to imagine that a full new draft could be produced much before the end of the 30 day voting period, much less reviewed.
So this is just supposition, but that would mean that the vote would be based primarily on (1) the proposed dispositions as originally distributed, (2) the small number of substantive dispositions that were revised during the meeting, (3) the 200 easy text revisions, and (4) the Report of the Meeting.
One intriguing question to ask is this: what about all of the dispositions for which small ad hoc working groups were appointed that never had time to report back their recommendations for discussion? This indicates that there was an issue with the disposition, and that a better fix might have been available, but no way to take advantage of that better alternative.
– Andy
Thank you for that information, Andy.
Do you have any feel for the impact of the various press and ‘internet buzz’ one way or another ?
My concerns are as follows:
1. The MS marketing engine prematurely declares victory and does so loudly enough and often enough that (repeating a lie often enough makes it true) their version becomes ‘conventional wisdom’.
2. Meanwhile, official information is lacking so there is no way to counter this media blitz with true facts (because there aren’t any).
3. The changes & draft are *SO* large that whatever report with edits is inevitably delayed just due to the pure size of the DIS+changes and a need to verify the accuracy of the post-BRM draft.
4. Every day the official report is postponed is one less day for NBs to review the revision. Both the generation of the revision (or even a report of the revisions) and the review and assimilation of the revised draft need as much time as possible (and the clock is ticking).
5. Should any NB appeals be filed due to the discussions either here or on Groklaw based on the JTC 1 not following its own rules, there could be a *huge* impact on the revised DIS (Take for example that the last vote gets invalidated and those edits are all ruled as ‘fail’ due to lack of consensus – the revisions would have to be backed out. Should the O-Members get ruled as ‘non-votes’ the big-ballot vote results may change drastically with corresponding impacts on the revised draft that may have already been sent out to the NBs). You see what I mean…
6. After all the internet buzz and after MS has already announced its ‘win’ to their business partners, I suspect that economic pressures from those same business partners will not look kindly upon the JTC 1 results *finally* being published and indicating that due to irregularities, the BRM is a failure and the OOXML DIS has failed (for example). Consider the case in Denmark that is already declaring OOXML an ‘open approved format’ for government documents.
7. Will the NBs that did not attend the BRM have any time at all to review this monster spec before their vote is due ? Will they know what to review ? (Remember the mis-information spread to NBs that they *only* needed to review their own comments as preparation, then got a last-minute requirement to vote on everything…)
8. On a different vein, is the presence of MS employees on so many delegations of concern to anyone but myself. Do these people not have the decency or integrity to recuse themselves due to conflict of interest ?
9. The more I think about it, the more I’m bothered by a statement made in either the OpenMalaysia or the Greek blog that Brian Jones (from Microsoft) made a last-minute (Friday afternoon?) proposal that the BRM be ‘interoperable’ with the ECMA recommendation. This is the type of conflict of interest I meant in my previous item. Such ‘interoperability’ would basically require that no change can be allowed that prevents Microsoft’s ability to continue utilizing it’s proprietary protocols & undocumented features. This in turn prevents any hope of interoperability because it allows Microsoft to utilize it’s Office 2007 market share to either demand royalties of any and all interoperable products for the use of their precious IP that is *not* covered under the OSP (referenced in the spec or reverse-engineered if macros, etc). It would also allow MS to not bother to ‘fix’ MSO2k7 to make it open or interoperable with standards, but to take the ‘deprecated’ approach which is really not interoperable with any other implementation.
10. I get the distinct impression that MS already has a multi-million-dollar advertising blitz primed and ready to go, just waiting for the final approval of their shiny, brand-spanking-new ISO stamp-of-approval. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m not.
–Ed
I did not mean to criticize his intentions. He had posted several comments were he had indicated he was interested in what flaws people were seeing in what he wrote. Since I was warning people elsewhere that his article was confusing and misleading, I thought perhaps the right thing to do was to comment here. Since he hasn’t responded directly, I’m not sure if he appreciated the information or not, but it seems doubtful. Oh, well.
I suppose I was a little ticked off and embarrassed that I took his original title at face value. I went and posted a comment with the title "MS lost! OOXML rejected" at Groklaw. Once I understood the truth a little better (and remembered what the BRM was about), I posted a correction, but don’t know who I mislead in the meantime. (It’s still there if you care to look for it; I can’t delete or edit my own comments.) That’s very embarrassing to me. Maybe I should have known better than to trust Mr. Updegrove so much under the circumstances, but I did feel mislead, which is magnified by the embarrassment and concern that I mislead others. I, however, did the best I could to repair the damage that I had a part in causing. I thought Mr. Updegrove might want to do the same, if he was made aware of it.
What Mr. Updegrove is doing is a tricky thing. I’m no expert, but I know any flaws in what he writes have a cost. They will demoralize and confuse people on one side and the other side will take advantage of them for their own spin. OTOH, there’s only 24 hours in a day, and only one Andy Updegrove. I was pointing out that people were getting confused (maybe he wasn’t aware of that or why), but only he knows if he has the time or interest to fix things, especially since the new material is making the old less important. I’m fine with that.
Perhaps my tone came across a bit harsher than I intended. I certainly don’t have any great communication skills, I know.
As if to prove I have no great communication skills, I just wrote the past tense (or past participle?) of mislead as "mislead". It should have been "misled." Sorry.
Sounds to me like you’re suffering from some of the same shortcomings Andy suffers from:
– Early confusion about what happened
– Lack of full details on the day the BRM ended
– Lack of complete understanding of the whole BRM/JTC1 process/environment as of the day the BRM ended.
– Lack of first-hand details behind the big-ballot vote. Lack of background and context for the big-ballot vote.
– Lack of having been there
– Desire to ‘get it right the first time’
– Lack of perfection
– Personal Integrity
– Sense of honor
– Desire to set/keep the record straight both for posterity and as an accurate reference for others
– Desire to find out what REALLY happened – as opposed to reading spin after the fact.
– Embarrassment when you inadvertently mislead people
I don’t see where these shortcomings have impacted the Microsoft bloggers. …Must be some of the mental handicaps that we open-source supporters work under….
Like me, I suspect you and Andy both would have trouble working for Microsoft. 😉
— Ed
@E-Man,
I apologize for not acknowledging your comment sooner. The main reasons are that I have been overwhelmed with other work (catching up after returning from Geneva) and because I think that I’ve already addressed all of your concerns in comments that I had already posted, or was in the process of posting, in response to Alex Brown, or in updates to the blog entry itself. Also, I thought that Ed Winter had kindly stepped in to say most of what needed to be said. That said, I’m sorry for the delay, as I do try to respond to all comments that obviously are looking for a response.
More specifically, here are answers to your comments:
I do regret that there were some inaccurracies in the entry, and have said that in another response. I’ve also explained in great detail why I’m sticking with the title in my dialogue with Alex. I’ve also been quoted (at last count) in scores or articles in virtually all the technology press, and others such as the Washington Post, and in all of them the facts quoted are accurate and the message clear, and based on a press alert I sent out, rather than the blog entry, so I think that the accurate story will propagate.
I didn’t mention the change in title in the update summary, because it is in the comments to Alex, and also the substance of the change is included in another updated change in the text itself.
As to this:
I think that the table and text are clear. I’m not a perfect writer, I’m sure, but I’m not aware that other people had a problem with this. I do the best I can, and people seem to find value in it overall. I don’t want to get into a discussion as to whether the table could have been clearer. I have no editor and need to do the best I can. I’m not aware that many people had a problem with it.
Of course – and that is the entire point of the blog entry! ISO/IEC closed the BRM crowing about how it had been such a big success, and how 98.4% of the dispositions had been approved. It was crucial to give the facts on that so that everyone would not be misled, and so that Jason Matusow’s account would not be the only one that journalists saw when they wrote the first articles. If you do a Google search, you will see that most of the articles that have been written were written within 48 hours of the close of the BRM. Absent my press alert, the story would already have been written that the BRM was a great success, and outside the blogosphere – such as in government circles – it would have been too late to correct the damage. Sometimes you need to go to press with the information you have, before the worse damage is done.
This is what I was told by those that saw the votes. I can’t do more than report what I’ve heard from sources that I believe to be accurate.
Finally, I think that you need to appreciate that I took a week out of my life and my job to go to Geneva (I worked non-stop without sleep on the flights each way), put in 18 hour days while I was there, talked to as many people as I could (which is a lot), and that later accounts have confirmed the great majority of what I wrote. If you’d like to encourage people to continue to do things like that, you need to accept that sometimes non-professional reporters with no supporting resources are not going to be able to nail every fact – or, if they do, that it will be too late to matter.
– Andy
Don’t worry about not nailing every facts rights. I once had an experienced journalist, now the director of a major newsroom, confess to me he couldn’t read a single news article in the media on any topic he knew about without finding at least two errors of fact. By that measure your work is a huge scoop of outstanding quality.
Hard to know just where to start.
Let me just say that I’ve had the pleasure/hell of chairing many sessions in my adult life on issues contentious and otherwise.
One thing, though, was blindingly clear before the BRM was held. There as no way that a mere 5 days would even get a good start on doing what ISO/IEC say they wanted to do given the number of comments in the September 2007 balloting. So I’m not at all surprised that that is exactly what happened.
It isn’t as if this wasn’t known prior to the meeting and a longer session was rejected by ISO/IEC and the convenor Alex Brown. All within the rules, I note.
Now we all move to the next step on this proposed "standard" with more bad feelings and recrimination that was present before it started.
It strikes me that the fast track process was put in place for quick adoption of proposed standards on which there was a considerable level of agreement so that compressed time lines for sessions like the BRM stood a chance of success. That never existed here nor is it likely to given the proposal’s present form.
ECMA may not be guilty of out and out abuse of the fast track process given the above though the effect is the same. Perhaps worse as ISO/IEC has let the abuse go this far. Probably also within the rules which, by now, are known to be utterly incapable of handling a proposal like this.
Nothing, I’m sad to say, will change the black eye ISO has inflicted on itself with this opaque process, lacking any and all transparency which, at the end of the day, has left more confusion than when it started. The participants, NBs, Alex Brown and others present did their best with an impossible situation that would never have been allowed to happen by a competent standards organization. That’s how ISO looks now.
Incompetent.
ttfn
John
Does the OOXML spcecification in its current state guarantee long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers?
Regards,
No.
The longer answer is also "No," in painful detail.
Hi Andy (and Alex, I suppose)
I’ve read a lot of the accounts and your blog, but what I think fails to appear clearly is the basis of the entire mess of this process.
I think the clearest picture is achieved by combining http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1114 and http://elot.ece.ntua.gr/te48/ooxml/brm-clarifications with your accounts of the procedure here (over the last year).
The cause of the fast-track is the relationship of ISO with ECMA, which I gather has been under strain longer than just this particular "standard". The failing of the first step of the fast track causes an abomination of a standards process, because it’s trying to save spilt milk. The resulting BRM can only work with a very limited set of issues, which shouldn’t cause a failure of the first fast-track vote in the first place.
As I understand it, the technical nature of the BRM will only try to resolve the issues itself, not resolve whether the proposed standard is fit for its job or the title of ISO standard. In fact, there is no vote on that, since ECMA is allowed to enter their "standards" in the fast-lane, but I digress. A tally of the "approve/disapprove" votes will determine whether the fast-track procedure has succeeded and the proposal is made a full ISO standard (with issues to be resolved, I presume). This tally is the apples and oranges bit, because the type of the majority of issues resolved (typos, grammar, etc.) are not indicative of the quality of the standard at all!
OOXML is a cuckoo’s egg in ISO’s nest!
I have no doubt the final outcome will be approval, because alternatively it will require an all-out subversion of the process to block it. Instead of taking the process serious, NB’s should change their votes to an all disapprove one, to indicate their lack of acceptance of the standard, instead of the specific approval/disapproval of the technical issues.
Cheers
Simon Oosthoek (interested spectator)
Andy,
You’ll probably be interested to know the (edited) meeting notes and the resolutions are up for download….
Meeting resolutions
Edited notes of the meeting
James
Just as I thought… Couldn’t follow your own agenda…
Didn’t take a resolution to prepare a new text (should have been the final resolution/vote). So it looks like you came up with a list of editing instructions but not a revision to the text. You’d better tell everyone… The votes are over, no new resolved text means no resolution at the BRM, which by the procedure means no additional voting. Votes should officially stand as they did last fall. DIS 29500 is not able to be approved on fast track.
You’d better advise those ISO PR people that they are wrong. Additional voting would be fraud. I’m certain that’s a crime in most places.
MS is going to be disappointed, but it’s a convicted criminal (in the US for antitrust violations) anyhow and I have trouble feeling sorry for criminals especially when it appears they are still committing the same crime elsewhere.
Andy following on from my previous post (with the links to the notes and resolutions) and having now had time to read through the PDFs I get this distinct impression…
NB1:"Gah this is awful… at the very least it should be done like this to start with"
NB2:"Indeed this would be a lot more suitable for a spec"
Rest:"Agreed – the editor is instructed to incorporate resolution X"
Consequently most of the resolutions were to get the text in a state that could possibly be presented at the start of the standardisation process. I understand that all there were professionals and I expect they all felt an obligation to at least produce a text that was improved over that which they had initially been given (and hence a no to keep the text as is would be non-sensical to a certain extent except as a protest) but I believe that is exactly what crippled the process.
There appears to have been so many basic changes to it (that quite frankly should have been sorted in ECMA first) that by the time those were heard and accepted there was little or no time at all for proper polish and technical discussion at the BRM to make it worthy of an ISO stamp.
So yes consequently a lot of changes were accepted…. but if I submitted a thesis or other work and then had 100+ people point out broken XML fragments, random oddities (the date stuff being a great example there) and simple grammar/spelling mistakes would I be proud of those changes and broadcast to the world how great it is that I convinced 100+ other people to do basic correction on it for me? Of course not – any sensible person would be embarrassed by the mistakes.
Do you – or Alex if you are reading this – have any comments on this based on your experiences last week?
James
James,
First, thanks very much for providing those links; I’ll add them to the "update" section at the top of the blog entry so that they’re easy to find.
On your other questions, I should read the notes first. While I’ve talked to a lot of people who described things over all in general and parts in detail, now that the notes are available I should look at those first and see how the two line up.
– Andy
Heh I feel a bit bad your giving my credit for the links at the top… They were on Alex’s blog and I got them via Groklaw. Only posted here as a heads up to you.
Indeed take your time to read them – I have plenty of time today as I play with the currently shipping SCO UnixWare (don’t ask…) and look forward to an informed response when you have had time to take it all in 🙂
James
And I posted them on Groklaw, but found them in Yoon Kit’s blog on Open Malaysia. And I am very happy to credit him for almost anything!
Winter
Andy having read your comments at the top of the blog about the minutes and resolutions you may be interested to hear what Rob Weir has to say about them (given that he was actually there):
James,
This is pretty much what I expected was the case; given the length of the meeting and the brevity of the notes, they seem primarily intended to give a modest amount of context for the resolutions that were formally moved and adopted or failed. It would have been particularly interesting to have seen more detail on the discussions relating to the final ballot. i note, for example, that "Option 3" isn’t even described.
– Andy
A short statement on option 3 and unamended option 4 is in the Art of Being Mugged. Alex’s documents confirm Rob Weir’s story of the events is accurate.
Does the ‘edited’ nature of these notes go far enough to qualify as bias ? As propaganda ?
Can we take these notes as accurate ?
Can we take these notes as complete ?
Your post suggests that there are some (many?) missing dispositions (both passed and failed) as well as missing resolutions to dispositions (either rejected or denied a hearing) that never made it into these notes.
If any of the above is close to accurate, what is the purpose of Alex Brown’s publication of these notes ? Propaganda to ‘appease the masses’ ? Cause delay until it becomes too late to do anything about the end-of-month vote ?
If these public ‘minutes’ of the BRM are anything like those sent to the NBs, how can we be sure the NBs are getting accurate (and complete) data about the changes to the DIS made by the BRM ? Are we being fed mis-information or incomplete information ?
— Ed
Andy, Being an ODF supporter, I had liked your blog.
However, You have completely lost my respect and credibility after seeing ISO Chairman’s comment on your BRM blog post.
Better than referring to Jason Matusaws blog you could just use the original pressreleases of the national bodies
Official Stands Norway press release in english.
http://www.standard.no/imaker.exe=3fid=3d18504
Official Denamrk press release in English
http://www.en.ds.dk/4200
Official New Zealand press release
http://www.standards.co.nz/news/Media+releases/New+Zealand’s+voice+heard+at+Geneva+OOXML+meeting.htm
Also US vote on Office Open XML stays approval (even despite the voting descisions at the BRM of both Rob Weir and Frank Farance)
http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/archive/2008/03/07/us-v1-technical-committee-votes-to-recommend-approval-of-dis-29500.aspx
Thanks; these weren’t available at the time I added the links before. I’ll swap them out now.
– Andy
I thought it might be useful to have somewhere to post the results of the actual Post-BRM NB votes – whether they change or not.
Looks like the US vote may already have been decided – and not on technical grounds. From Doug MaHugh’s blog:
"I just got off a 3-hour call with my colleagues on the V1 technical committee, in which I and the other members of the US delegation to the BRM presented our thoughts on what happened at the BRM. Then we all voted on what to recommend to the INCITS Executive Board for the final US position on DIS 29500.
The final outcome: we are recommending that the US maintain its Approve position on DIS 29500. The next step will be for the INCITS Executive Board to conduct a letter ballot to approve this result."
This seems to be pretty quick work given the contention that has been discussed here and elsewhere concerning the BRM irregularities.
Looks like Mr Farance was out-numbered (or out-maneuvered) by MS-controlled votes and that the US does not appear that it will at all be supporting standards quality where DIS29500 is concerned.
Why does the INCITS Executive Board need to conduct a letter ballot ? I thought that only applied if the vote was to change ?
Or is this INCITS conducting an internal US ballot of the V1 committee and others to determine whether the US will change its vote ?
Isn’t this a bit early to have already decided that MSOOXML (Post BRM) is satisfactory as an ISO standard ?
I’m wondering how deep into the US standards approval process the corruption of the MSOOXML marketing has penetrated since I’m seeing the damage done to the US economy by MS products on a daily basis.
For those not aware, while MS vendors are working around MS bugs & limitations, companies owned by overseas corporations are moving to Linux en mass and have IT departments that support their business plans instead of business plans that support their IT and Microsoft.
If there ever were a black-and-white decision on standards acceptability, DIS29500 should be that standard and I fear that the US will be influenced by other than technical and usability aspects of this DIS (aspects such as $$$).
–Ed
Ed,
I should be connecting with someone later today who will fill me in on the schedule for the US decision between now and March 29. As has been noted in a few places, the Executive Board of INCITS, so my understanding is that Mahugh’s committee’s vote is a recommendation to the EB, which would be informed, but not bound, by its recommendation.
– Andy
Ahhh yes those standards bodies rumbling it out to get what their corporate sponsirs want. Hasn’t anyone learned from Novel. Don’t try to force a company standard on other people.
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I think voting should have voters more actively involved instead of having a default abstain. Most votes would have been on issues where they are directly related or have any interest.
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