ISO officials, others dispute claims that Open XML meeting was flawed

Computerworld - The ISO official who was in charge of a meeting held last week to discuss possible changes to the Office Open XML standards proposal is hitting back at claims by critics that established rules were disregarded in a bid to hasten the adoption of the Microsoft Corp. file format as an open standard.

Alex Brown, who in ISO parlance was the convener of last week's ballot resolution meeting (BRM) at the standards organization's Geneva headquarters, defends two controversial decisions that he oversaw: allowing the national standards bodies represented at the meeting to approve about 900 of the 1,100 changes made to the Open XML proposal on a single vote after little or no discussion, and letting lower-status "observer" countries — or O-members — take part in that vote.

"Yes, it was a good idea to take votes (congratulations to the BRM on wisely choosing this route)," Brown wrote in a message that he posted Monday on the blog of technology attorney and Open XML critic Andrew Updegrove. "Yes, it was within my, and the meeting's, powers to allow it. Yes, what happened was fully in accord with the JTC 1 Directives (O-member voting and all)." JTC 1 is the technical committee in charge of IT standards within ISO.

Brown, who is a technical director at a company in Cambridge, England, added that the voting procedures were "discussed in minute detail" before the meeting, in consultation with ISO's Information Technology Task Force. And he contended that parts of a written analysis of the meeting by Updegrove were "factually misleading."

Updegrove, who was in Geneva last week and said he talked to many of the ISO delegates while the meeting was in progress and afterwards, has been outspoken in his criticism of what took place during the proceedings. "People here are disgusted," he told Computerworld by phone from Geneva last Friday. "The absurdity of trying to do this by a 'fast track' process became quite apparent this week."

He wasn't alone in his criticism of the meeting, which was a prelude to a second round of balloting within ISO on whether to approve the Open XML standards bid. The proposal, which was submitted by standards body Ecma International under ISO's fast-track approach, received a majority of the votes cast in the first round last September but not enough to win approval. The new balloting is scheduled to end March 29.

Frank Farance, an IT consultant who headed the U.S. delegation to the ballot resolution meeting, said afterward that there likely will be "hundreds of defects" in the Open XML specification if it is accepted as a standard in its current form. "Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," Farance said. "I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25 years."

On Wednesday, ISO's press office released a statement about the meeting, detailing and defending the process that was followed in Geneva.

"At the beginning of the meeting, each national body was invited to raise the issues they considered to be their priority so that these could be discussed during the BRM," ISO said in the statement. "When it was apparent that it would not be possible for all comments to be reviewed individually, the meeting discussed and agreed on a voting procedure to decide on the remaining proposed modifications."