I am writing this sitting on the Eurostar from Brussels to London, having just attended an event organised by the Centre for European Policy Studies to discuss “EU Innovation Policy and the Role of Standards”. It was an exciting chance to get to express a view to some of the movers and shaker in and around the European Commission, as well as to take some photos of Brussels and get some last-minute Christmas shopping done (chocolates!).

Brussels by Night — Église Sainte-Marie.

As the meeting was quite brief, I had decided in advance that any message I wanted to get across would need to attempt to be both honed and compact. I also thought it was likely that the issue of OOXML might be raised – so I was fully ready on that score too, even though I took care to avoid the “single issue politics” approach which seems to have characterised some of the debate on this topic. As it was, the topic was hardly raised and when it was I was glad to be able to put straight some misconceptions floating around about the difference between the PAS and Fast Track procedures.

Over the course of the meeting we heard from Renate Weissenhorn (DG Industry, Head of Standardization Unit) on the importance of standardisation for innovation in the EU, in a presentation which nicely set the scene for what followed. Knut Blind (Berlin University) had carried-out a deep study of some of the subtle interrelations (among other things) between standards and legislation. His presentation, like that of Anne Lehouck (DG Industry, ICT for Competitiveness and Innovation) made me appreciate that if I had thought international standardisation is a complex system, it is as nothing compared to the complexity of trying to set policy in a world with so many disparate standardisation bodies and concerns. Ms Lehouck outlined some of the things which would, and would not, appear in a forthcoming white paper on EU standardisation policy. One thing that particularly interested me was that the EU had decided (of course) on the primacy of IETF specifications in their area, even though IETF is not a formally EU-recognised body. I did say it was complex …

For my own presentation, the need for brevity meant there were quite a few interesting topics which did not survive the triage when preparing my slides – notably the widely-held UK view (though I was representing myself, not the UK) that the European-level standards institutions are, by and large, a waste of space, and that European nations should be using International Standards for all but a very few niche cases where a “European dimension” exists and a regional layer (i.e. a European layer) can bring benefits.

I also confined myself carefully to my own area of knowledge; ISO/IEC (JTC 1) ICT standardisation.

Following a few introductory slides on the functioning of JTC 1, and given the task of predicting the immediate future and describing the challenges ahead, I focussed on four main headings, as set out in the sections that follow.

Resisting vendor encroachment

The points here are:

• Vendors dislike international standardisation (when it does not function in their favour)

Anybody who has read my earlier piece will find the background argument to this familiar: international standardisation is an activity for nations and vendors have no standing. From time to time this causes upset (and in part explains some of the vendor-led assault on the integrity of the European standards institutions following the passage of OOXML).

• Expect continual pressure for a means of “direct participation” by vendors

A corollary of the above is a continued attempt for vendors to participate (i.e. have voting rights) in the international process. My own view on this is quite stark: vendors must never be allowed such rights.

• Governments must strongly resist this and maintain the de jure institutions such as ISO for their own use as bulwarks against corporate tyranny

My point here is that the international standards organisations are made “by governments, for governments”. The use of the words “corporate tyranny” are quite strong – but for myself I am convinced that the power afforded to corporations by the data collection and inspection efforts they may now mount today mean that, more than ever, governments are necessary to keep corporations, rapacious beasts that they are, in check.

Surprisingly (to me) it was this view which gathered most negative reaction, with a view expressed around the table that standards should be made “by industry for industry” and that governments should generally not interfere (much was also made of the distinction between a nation’s view and the view of that nation’s government – which I should treat with more rigour). Of course this is partly right too. I think I need to find a more nuanced way of describing how “industry” may be involved, but without being allowed the final say, at least in international standardisation. I think though, I have a wider view of the social dimension government can bring, and a sharper suspicion of the evils of corporatism, than seems to be currently common in EU circles. I’d never thought of myself as left-wing before. Hmmm.

Effects of economic slowdown

• It is difficult for vendors to commit staff to standardisation activities when under economic pressure

As predictions go, this one doesn’t require much insight. Already the ICT industry is seeing lay-offs in large numbers as the global recession bites. There is always a danger when the pressure is on that standardisation is seen as a luxury, non-gainful activity – and the kinds of gurus and thought-leaders in corporations who do this stuff can find their jobs under threat.

• Health and survival of vendor-led consortia threatened

On a larger level, corporations themselves (those that survive) might come to see participation in standards activities as something which might be given a rest. For consortia which depend on the corporate dollar this can present a challenge. Some commentators, for example, see the W3C’s (perfectly reasonable) recent announcement of validator donation program (“we really can use that money”) as just such evidence of the negative impact of recession on standardisation.

• Standardisation needs to be recognised as of much as a market-enabler as pure innovation; governments may assist

This is the nub: standardisation is (when it is done well) a first-class form of market enablement. Yet the myopic corporations are not generally in a position to see this, and even if they can they have no interest (they tend to be interested only in markets in which they are confident they can win, rather than in market creation in the general sense). And so this is a perfect example of where governments, with their (one hopes) wider and longer-term view, can intervene by continuing to support standards activities through supporting their National Standards Bodies.

Reform / modernisation

• The publishing business model of many European standards bodies (“selling pages”) is out of tune with the realities of modern ICT standardisation

The broken business model of National Standards Bodies is a serious problem. With ICT standards often (by demand) being given away free-of-charge the traditional means by which NBs can recoup the cost of making standards has gone away. Why, then, should they bother? I have no quick answer to this question, but I expect an answer would involve the need to have both governments and vendors contributing more to the financial cost of creating international ICT standards.

• Some European bodies assist experts in standardisation in their duties, but this is far from universal

Related to this is the fact the individual experts who are not employed by corporations can find it difficult to contribute to international standardisation – especially when international travel is required. Some enlightened standards bodies (the UK for example) do help defray these expenses but it would be worthwhile to see this kind of support more widely and consistently deployed throughout the European nations. The danger is that if independents cannot be funded, the void will be entirely filled by well-funded corporate employees, and the ensuing lack of balance would be regrettable.

• The Directives governing JTC 1 standardisation are archaic and confusing and in need of improvement

Another kind of reform that is needed is that of the JTC 1 Directives themselves. This dovetails with the above two points as securing this kind of reform requires dedicated experts – it will not just happen by itself.

IPR reform

• The patent spectres haunting innovation in ICT are also at work in the standards arena

The discussion around IPR, and particularly patents, in the EU is a vibrant one. My own view is that software patents are A Bad Thing but if we are to have them then standardisation could have a particular role to play in the standardisation landscape.

• Ideally, an International Standard should provide a guarantee of freedom from IPR encumbrance

This idea (first raised on this blog by André Rebentisch) is that a certain class of International Standards could provide a “safe haven” for implementers, who should feel secured against legal action for any implementations that arise directly from the use of that standard.

• Governments (the EU) could usefully legislate in this area

The way this could be practically achieved is for the EU to legislate that for certain de jure standards (JTC 1 ones, in my examples) which are labelled as unencumbered, there was an absolute defence against patent actions centred around IPR embodied therein. IANAL, but this kind of thing could usefully protect innovation and further enhance and clarify the role of de jure standards organisations, and the special relationship they have with governments/nations.

Again, here I sensed I was a little out-of-tune with the consensus round the table, which seemed to hold that patents were a given, and a useful aspect of the standards landscape (of course, it difficult to tell here how much that view applied to the area of ICT on which I was focussed, and which brings its own particular difficulties). On the other hand, there was general agreement that this area was one in which a lot of further work is required.

Brussels by Night — Hotel Frontage.

“JTC 1 recognizes the timely response (JTC 1 N9398) from OASIS to the SC 34 liaison statement (SC34 N1095 […]), and thanks OASIS for the new draft errata to ODF 1.0. JTC 1 particularly welcomes OASIS's proposal to confer with JTC 1 and SC 34 to forge a genuine partnership for collaboratively handling the maintenance of ODF/IS 26300. JTC 1 requests SC 34 and OASIS to develop a document specifying the detailed operation of joint maintenance procedures, with a common goal of preparation of technically-equivalent documents, and taking into account the requirements and constraints of both standards bodies. SC 34 is requested to consider this document at its March 2009 plenary and report the results to JTC 1 following this meeting.”

(See the SC 34 chairman’s Business Plan, as presented in Nara, for
this and other interesting information.)

The prelude to this resolution is a sequence of exchanges between SC 34 and OASIS. Now, while highly selective leaking to unwitting and credulous sites may have succeeded in producing a fuss in the blogosphere (see, for example, groklaw's “The Microsoft-Stacked SC 34 Committee Makes a Move”) the truth is rather less sensational, and speaks more of parties of good will wanting to make progress, than of the crazed oppositional narrative of “MS vs the world” that the tinfoil brigade seems increasingly desperate to try to perpetuate. The liaison statement from SC 34 to OASIS out of Jeju was, of course, not leaked to/by groklaw because it did not fit with that crazed narrative. I don’t believe it is giving too much away to reveal its concluding words were: “SC 34 is open to suggestions as to how to reach a resolution of this issue that is mutually acceptable to OASIS and SC 34.”

The tinfoil hat wearers are desperate to construct a a narrative around ODF in which MS plays the villain; facts are getting in their way. (Photo credit: Rob Watkins. Licence.)

OASIS duly replied indicating in the course of their communication that they too were interested in such a mutually acceptable resolution, in particular for the maintenance issues (of errata and defects) that had arisen from the current unsatisfactory maintenance agreement.

And so it was that in Nara representatives of JTC 1, SC 34, OASIS and some of the commercial stakeholders in ODF worked hard and hammered out the text above, which was duly amended and blessed by the JTC 1 members (nations) – who are, ultimately, the decision makers in charge of international standardisation.

Reading the Runes

The first two sentences of the resolution set out the background. The third contains the meat:

“JTC1 requests SC34 and OASIS to develop a document specifying the detailed operation of joint maintenance procedures, with a common goal of preparation of technically-equivalent documents, and taking into account the requirements and constraints of both standards bodies.”

The three key phrases here are, I think, these:

• “joint maintenance procedures” – critically maintenance (in JTC 1 terms “maintenance” includes the following activities: revision, withdrawal, periodic review, correction of defects, amendment, and stabilization) will now be a joint activity, rather than one conducted exclusively in isolation.
• “technically-equivalent documents” – so, documents must be the same (apart from such non-technical things as cover pages). By keeping the OASIS and International Standard versions in step-lock with each other, marketplace confusion can be avoided by eliminating doubts about version differences
• “the requirements and constraints of both standards bodies” – OASIS and JTC 1 have different ways of doing things; some way will need to be found so that all concerns are properly met.

Now, I have no idea what the final maintenance agreement is going to look like. SC 34 people and OASIS are going to keep working hard over the next few months and it is anticipated these negotiations will culminate in a face-to-face summit to be held in Okinawa at the end of January 2009, to coincide with the meetings of WG 4 (dedicated to OOXML) and WG 5 (dedicated to document format interop, particularly ODF/OOXML). Any agreed text will ultimately need to be blessed by the two top-levels of the organisations … this is, after all, an agreement between JTC 1 and OASIS, and not between SC 34 and OASIS, or SC 34 and the ODF TC. Okinawa certainly looks like it is going to be the site of a vibrant meeting, with OOXML and ODF folks attending in numbers…

My personal hunch about the shape of the final maintenance arrangement is that it will be less like the one SC 34 arranged with Ecma, in which the Ecma TC was absorbed into a new Working Group, and something more akin to a parallel-running process, with mechanisms for exchanging information and synchronising key activities. But that is just my personal hunch.

Spreading the Love

Via Doug Mahugh, from Redmond, comes the happy announcement (even IBM’s Bob Sutor called it “excellent news”) that Microsoft will be participating in OASIS’s ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC (see Rob Weir’s post for background on this activity). This is really good to hear. With the release of Office 2007 SP2 Microsoft are suddenly going to find themselves stewards of by far the biggest installed user-base of ODF office applications, so it is vital for users they are part of the conversation developers and vendors need to be having about making their implementations interoperate.

From the uncertainty that marked the beginning of the year, these latest pieces of news are very positive indications of progress in the document format space. So much has been accomplished in 2008, and I have every confidence 2009 is going to see this positive progress continue …

This is the first of ten pieces which follow on from the initial overview of this subject.

International standardisation has a problem: many people outside the process (and even a few inside it) do not understand, at a basic level, what it is. Defining “standardisation” is easy enough – standardisation is essentially just agreeing on a specification; the far trickier concept is “international”. Let us look at some things which do not define international standardisation:

• It does not mean that people from many nationalities are involved
• It does not mean that particular problems of localisation are particularly attended to
• It does not mean the standard has a good chance of applying anywhere on the planet

Of course all of these things can be, and nearly always are, characteristics of International standardisation; but they do not define it. No, what defines international standardisation is that the agreements made are, literally, inter-national – or, in other words, between nations. Not between individuals, or lobby groups, or movements, or government departments, or corporations – but nations. This is the defining characteristic of international standardisation.

It is a respect for this international essence which will guide much of what follows in these pieces. It accounts for the complexity of the process, and it explains its value. The international aspect is, I argue, the guiding principle on which the mechanisms of JTC 1 should be built, and by which the activities of JTC 1 should be judged.

Has International Standardisation a Future?

Some have argued that International Standardisation is not relevant to the modern world, and particularly to the modern world of ICT standardisation. Bob Sutor (VP of Standards, IBM) has written a number of weblog entries reacting to the 2008 standardisation of ICO/IEC 29500. He speculates thus:

[W]hile [ISO and IEC have] created thousands of standards for safety, mining, agriculture, and other areas, perhaps people are now shifting away from thinking that these groups should have anything to do with IT and interoperability standards. […] With the actions of the ISO and IEC, I think people have every reason to think that way. I feel that way.

And suggests,

I think people need to remember that important, and sometimes more important, standards work is taking place in standards groups like the W3C, OASIS, IEEE, OMG, and the OAGI. That is, in my opinion, the ultimate stamp of quality and acceptance need not be from the ISO or one of the other I** organizations.

Is Sutor’s feeling (or the feelings of the “people” he mentions) justified? Are ISO and IEC ICT standards irrelevant today as compared to those from vendor consortia like those Sutor mentions? Against this, the JTC 1 Directives themselves assert some benefits of international standardisation

International Standards (IS) issued by JTC 1 are considered the most authoritative standards on IT. […] ISs […] are recognised throughout the world, and in many countries constitute the technical regulatory basis for public procurement of IT goods and services. The transposition of a specification into an IS […] makes it eligible for such procurement, and hence widens the market recognition of such a specification.

The argument is however rather smug and circular, and amounts to “international standards are authoritative and that leads to their market impact; this impact makes them authoritative”. Starting from fundamentals, five more convincing arguments may, I think, be made.

1. Diversity as a Hedge

The principal alternative to having a strictly international organisation set ICT standards is to have a vendor-led consortium doing it. Whatever the relative merits of International vs. consortia standards, I would argue it is risky to argue for a world in which International standardisation has ceased to exist and we only have one type of standards body.

Over the last decade we have witnessed movement of experts back and forth between the consortium and International Standards world. It is presumptuous to declare standards could only be made one way, and to construct a world around that presumption. Those who argue against international standardisation itself are in effect declaring they are so sure of its worthlessness that it must be actively eliminated, presumably by dismantling the national standards bodies of all nations and dissolving the international standards frameworks in which they participate, including ISO, IEC, the UN bodies, and ITU-T.

2. Stability

Standards consortia are essentially commercially-based entities relying for their continued existence on the membership fees of their (mainly commercial) members. As such they are subject to the vagaries of the market and the collective whim of their membership. In recent years the market conditions in which consortia exist have become more difficult, and there is every reason to believe, with the recent difficulties in the global economy, that this situation will not improve. Indeed recent events have rather served to demonstrate that the apparently mightiest commercial entities are vulnerable compared to governments – the true last resort of stability. We can have no confidence today in the continuing existence of any particular ICT consortium in the short, let alone the medium, term.

The de jure standards organisations have the rock-like backing of governments supporting national standards bodies. This is a necessary and appropriate stability, considering that these de jure bodies are responsible for the stewardship of over 17,000 published standards (in ISO). I have heard no convincing proposals for what might happen to these published standards if the de jure bodies were dismantled.

3. A voice for governments

There is much talk of the benefits of “openness” to the standards world today, yet ironically many of the proposed non-international alternatives to JTC 1 that have been proposed (usually based on vendor-led consortia) are, from the perspective of a national government, closed. How does it work if the country (the USA, say) wants a voice in a consortium body? What does it mean for vendors established in that nation if their view conflicts with “national policy”? The de jure bodies, with their – partly necessary – elaborate bureaucracy, are designed to channel and mediate such national positions effectively and provide an “open” forum for the expression of nations’ voices. Individuals and corporations may feel disenfranchised by this, but that rather misses the point … this is international standardisation.

4. Wider participation and dissemination

Another clear benefit of the international standardisation mechanisms is their sheer size. With 83 participating nations (in JTC 1), each with their own collections of committees, the number of experts that may be called on is impressive, many of them bring distinctive and valuable requirements and expertise to the table. The recent standardisation of ISO/IEC 29500, for example, drew on the expertise of well over a thousand contributors form a wide variety of nations. It is hard to imagine non-international structures ever achieving similar levels of concentration of thought power.

Standards that are made internationally also have greater reach through being transposed into national standards by participating nations and translated into the native language(s) if necessary.

5. A bulwark against corporatism

As was observed above, nations are one of the few types of entity that can be relied on to provide better stability than global corporations. By the same token, nations are the only entities left on this planet with sufficient power to resist any untoward behaviour on the part of those corporations; nations collectively can, and frequently do, arrive at conclusions which dismay corporations. With the voices of nations removed from standardisation, there would be no bar to complete corporate dominance of the standardisation space.

It is vital that governments are allowed to participate in standardisation, since governments have (or should have) a very different kind of compact with their citizens than corporations have with their consumers. The guiding principle of corporate activity is profit; governments are in a position to take a longer-term and socially informed view of national interest. It is we, the users of ICT standards, who have much to lose if this dimension becomes excluded from the ICT standards world.

There is some inaccurate information swirling around on the web about the maintenance of ISO/IEC 26300:2006 – Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.

For those following the story of document format standardisation, this blog entry sets out the current situation ahead of the upcoming JTC 1 plenary in Nara, Japan, where this very topic is likely to be discussed and, one hopes, get debugged.

Background

The diagram above illustrates the current and planned major variants of the ODF standard.

The topmost is the OASIS standard 1.0, published by OASIS afters its approval in May 2005.

This OASIS standard was submitted by OASIS to JTC 1 for PAS transposition in October 2005. It passed its ballot with no dissent in May 2006, although a number of countries requested substantive fixes and improvements.

Because there had been no negative votes (only approves and abstention) in the ballot, the ballot resolution meeting (BRM) for the new standard was cancelled. (The UK objected to this decision at the May 2006 SC 34 plenary meeting in Seoul.)

Based on the comments from NBs, some substantive fixes and improvements were duly made to ODF, and ITTF incorporated these into the text of ISO/IEC 26300:2006, published in November 2006.

An equivalent text, an OASIS Committee Specification (not a standard, N.B.) called “OpenDocument v1.0 (Second Edition)”, had been published by OASIS in July 2006.

OASIS subsequently authored and published a new OASIS standard, ODF 1.1. This was published three months after ISO 26300:2006, i.e. in February 2007. OASIS did not seek cooperation in this from any part of ISO/IEC, nor did them submit the revised specification to JTC 1.

OASIS then began work on ODF 1.2, again without any ISO/IEC involvement.

In July 2008 the co-chair of the OASIS ODF TC announced in a blog entry: “[n]o one supports ODF 1.0 today. All of the major vendors have moved on to ODF 1.1, and will be moving on to ODF 1.2 soon.”

Throughout 2007 Japan, who were translating ISO/IEC 26300 into Japanese, fed reports of defects to OASIS via an OASIS mailing list. A formal set of Defect Reports was submitted by the Japanese National Body in December 2007 and circulated to SC 34 members and liaisons (including OASIS). The JTC 1 Directives state that the Project Editor must respond to a Defect Report for a JTC 1 standard within two months. SC 34 received no response until August 2008, when it was informed by the OASIS ODF TC that a register of errata in the OASIS standard had been published.

OASIS have produced errata document which apply corrections for some of the defects that have been reported. Note however that OASIS cannot amend the text which is the basis of ISO/IEC 26300, as this text has only the status of “Committee Specification” within OASIS. Hence they propose amending the defective OASIS 1.0 (“1st Ed”) Standard, creating a new fork of the ODF specification. SC 34 are expected to cross-apply these fixes to their corresponding locations within ISO/IEC 26300.

It is unclear whether the reported defects which also apply to ODF 1.1 are to be applied in any way.

Communications from OASIS make it clear that OASIS believes it has entered into an agreement with JTC 1 which allows it to maintain ISO/IEC 26300 in a way which exempts it from the maintenance provisions of the JTC 1 Directives.

Problems

OASIS’s continually restated stated intention in its communications with JTC 1 is to prevent divergence of ODF versions. This goal has clearly not been realised, with a proliferation of versions of ODF inside OASIS and pronounced marketplace confusion.

For example, it should be of concern to JTC 1 members that the OpenOffice.org product is promoted as supporting “features of the upcoming version 1.2 of the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF)”.

OASIS’s continually restated intention in its communications with JTC 1 is to maintain a collaborative relationship. However there has not always been evidence of collaboration. Input from the ISO/IEC members has not been sought. Where input has been provided, it has sometimes been met with delay and dismissiveness.

The agreement that JTC 1 has reached with OASIS appears to be being operated in a way which breaches the JTC 1 Directives. The relevant portions of the Directives are given below (all emphasis mine):

Maintenance for a transposed PAS is also negotiated in the Explanatory Report. JTC 1's intention for maintenance is to avoid any divergence between the current JTC 1 revision of a transposed PAS and the current revision of the original specification published by the PAS submitter. Therefore, the Explanatory Report should contain a description of how the submitting organisation will work cooperatively with JTC 1 on maintenance of the standard. While JTC 1 is responsible for maintenance of the standard, this does not mean that JTC 1 itself must perform the maintenance function. JTC 1 may negotiate with the submitter the option of maintenance handled by the submitter as long as there is provision for participation of JTC 1 experts, i.e. the submitter's group responsible for maintenance is designated as the JTC 1 maintenance group. (Directives, 14.4.2)

For the maintenance of an International Standard of whatever origin normal JTC 1 rules apply. Such rules distinguish between correction of defects and revisions of or amendments to existing Standards. Note: The JTC 1 rules for maintenance are found in clause 15 of the JTC 1 Directives. For the correction of defects, JTC 1 provides for the installation of an editing group. Active participation of the submitter in such an editing group is expected and strongly encouraged. Depending on the degree of openness of the PAS submitter, JTC 1 will determine its specific approach. (Directives, M6.1.5)

Therefore it is clear that while maintenance may (in the lax wording of the Directives) be “handled” by the submitter, it is not possible for the submitter to exempt themselves from normal JTC 1 rules, as “for the maintenance of an International Standard of whatever origin normal JTC 1 rules apply”. From this it follows that a submitter’s “handling” of maintenance is limited, and that the decision-making procedures and time periods specified by the JTC 1 Directives must apply.

Remedies?

Obviously this is all an enormous mess and while it is tempting to blame lawyerly over-cleverness on the part of OASIS, or insufficient alertness on the part of JTC 1, in negotiating their so-called maintenance agreement, the true culprit is, in my view, the JTC 1 Directives – such an impenetrable document has, evidently, led to a completely different understanding of the situation from the several parties involved. This procedural mishap is, I argue, further evidence of the need to scrap and re-write the JTC 1 Directives as a short, clear and professionally drafted document. Already this year we have seen that when tough questions get asked, the Directives are not fit for purpose; we are seeing the same thing again now.

The immediate problem faced is, however, the future of ODF in JTC 1. This is not a matter for SC 34, or for the ODF TC (both of which groups are full of excellent  technical experts wanting nothing more that to produce good standards) – this is something that must be resolved at a higher level between JTC 1 and OASIS. In the usual way of things, the developers are being hampered by the management.

The essence of the problem is that a central principle is being missed now: that only a standard that has a truly international dimension to its control should benefit from the ISO, IEC or JTC 1 “brand”. Some immediate remedies might include some mix of the following:

• Since there seems to be general agreement that ISO/IEC 26300 is an obsolete version of ODF, perhaps it should be withdrawn as an IS – maybe in parallel with a PAS submission of ODF 1.1. That would at least give the world an IS that was widely used and a veil could be drawn over the 1.0 standardisation mess.
• SC 34 has already stated it is open to suggestions how future maintenance should be arranged in a genuinely collaborative manner. Patrick Durusau (the ODF editor) has drafted a proposed agreement in that spirit. Also, OASIS might well have a thing or two to learn by looking at how Ecma has managed to enter into a collaborative arrangement for the maintenance of ISO/IEC 29500 within JTC 1.
• The immediate defects in ISO/IEC 26300:2006 could be resolved by the formation of an editing group in SC 34. Indeed OASIS itself seemed to expect this in the explanatory report which accompanied their initial PAS submission which stated: “OASIS requests that any corrections of defects or errata from the JTC1 process be re-presented to the OASIS Technical Committee.” Per the Directives, OASIS TC members should be encouraged to participate in any such group.

Ultimately, it is for the nations participating in JTC 1 to decide how this matter can be resolved. The current situation sells-out the nations by allowing their brand (“international”) to be perpetuated in a process from which they are effectively excluded. This is “standardisation by corporation” through the back door. Whatever is decided, this must not go on.

The ongoing controversies surrounding the standardization of ISO/IEC 26300:2006 (OpenDocument Format 1.0) and ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (Office Open XML) have served to highlight several weaknesses in the International Standardisation processes for ICT specifications handled by JTC 1, the “Joint Technical Committee” that combines aspects of ISO and IEC for that purpose.
 
However newsworthy these particular projects have been, the underlying problems in JTC 1 go deeper, and I believe is incumbent on all who care to avoid solutions which smack of “single issue politics” – hard cases, after all, make bad law.
 
This post is the first in a series which aims to set out proposals for broad reforms that could help ensure JTC 1’s future. These posts are offered “out of process” as an informal starting point. They, like everything on this blog, are personal views – but have been informed by discussions with many experienced standardisers from many nations over the course of the last two years. My intention is that after the posts have been completed they will be assembled into a short paper (taking comments into account) which, I hope, may influence the onward international debate.

10 Recommendations for Reform

I make 10 recommendations and shall explore each in 10 forthcoming posts. In summary, they are:

1. Assert the worth of International Standardization

There are many organisations producing standards, but International Standardisation is the preserve of the de-jure organisations alone; this difference benefits the peoples of the world and must be preserved. The encroachment of “standardisation by corporation” must be resisted. More...

2. Recognise the distinctive requirements of ICT Standardisation

ICT standards are different from standards for piping, wiring or management processes; ISO and IEC need to make JTC 1 the sole steward of this distinctive subject area.

3. Re-draft the JTC 1 Directives

The JTC 1 Directives are an embarrassment; the current piecemeal patching efforts have palpably failed and serve only to empower administrators over nations. The Directives need to be re-drafted from scratch by professionals.

4. Move away from paper-based publication models

The current business model and many procedures within JTC 1 are predicated on producing and selling paper publications; this unnecessarily impedes the ICT standardisation process.

5. Widen International participation

In practice JTC 1 is currently dominated by a cosy club of rich, experienced nations; JTC 1 needs pursue a programme for fostering a much greater (i.e. genuinely international) reach.

6. Find a way for vendor-led standards to mesh with JTC 1 processes without compromising International control

Worthwhile standards will originate from outside JTC 1; a way must be found to make them International Standards avoiding the manifest flaws of the current accelerated adoption mechanisms.

7. Periodically change the nation having the Secretariat and Chair appointments

It is absurd that a purportedly International organisation has its effective HQ lodged for perpetuity in the USA.

8. Balance transparency and confidentiality

Openness and transparency can lead to better standardisation, but are by no means panaceas.

9. Clarify intellectual property policies

International Standards must have clearly stated IP policies, and avoid unacceptable patent encumbrances. More...

10. Encourage best practices at National level

International Standards rely on the efforts of the sovereign Nations that participate; JTC 1 should encourage these Nations to raise their games.