After noting the wrong-headedness of much of the anti-ISO commentary, he is quoted as saying of the standards process:...

Nice that you took the most moderate quote from the article.

It is cheap to blame everything on the users of the system. The other remarks demonstrate how much ISO functionaries as Bryden are out of touch with reality and unable to deal with the users they are supposed to serve.

Do you consider the possibility of him to be wrong? Because that would be a first step towards the recognition that not others might be the problem but the mere fact that ISO's practice did not catch up with its pride. And its a very bizarre symptome of a Stockholm syndrome to shield the real bully. Multiple standards are fine. Fast-tracking a half baked standard is fine. Let's kill the messengers. His remarks are so over-the-hill that its difficult for me to take him serious. The result is lack of respect.

'For a man to sacrifice to a spirit which does not belong to him is flattery. To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.' - Master Cong

You know very well that there is no anti-ISO movement yet. But ISO-trust of many industry players involved into the DIS 29500 process was on a rapid decline. Nobody wants anything else than an ISO that meets the expectations. The hilarious remarks of Bryden won't create an anti-ISO movement but rather undermine ISO's governance (!= ISO as an institution).

@Andre

It would of course be foolish to practice "single issue politics" in regard to ISO's International Standardisation activites. As the article wisely suggested, perspective is important...

- Alex.

Pure state of denial. It reads like "Why is everyone fixating on this plane crash? Look at all the planes we have that didn't crash. Why isn't anyone talking about them?"

Keep in mind also that Bryden had previously announced his retirement as ISO Secretary-General, effective at the end of the year. Ecma's chief, Jan van den Beld also retired last year. I'm anticipating some changes at the JTC1 leadership level as well. So by next year we'll have some fresh eyes to take a look at this problem, from people who were not involved in creating the problem in the first place.

@Rob

Hello! How was South Africa?

As you note, the JTC 1 chairman's term of office is drawing to a close. But I think much more than from any change of personnel at the top, the impetus for reform needs to come from the NBs - they are the ones who can modify the Directives and (therefore) change the rules of the process.

Do you get the impression there's much appetite for change in the US NB?

- Alex..

Fixing the bugs in the ISO won't help public perception unless the public perceive the fixes. I agree with the Secrerary General that much of the extreme criticism is based on false assumptions and a lack of understanding, so it seems logical that the ISO should make the organisation not just more transparent, but also more learnable for the general public.

Although ISO bloggers like yourself have made a sterling effort to explain things, learning remains much harder work than it need be. I've described my experience before as being like trying to learn number theory by listening to Newton discuss calculus, so I find it hard to blame those that don't wade through arguments they can't hope to understand just so they can be told off for not having been born grokking the dialectic method.

It's also worth remembering that a few dozen members of today's baying mob will grow up to be standards experts themselves, so teaching them the basics now will pay off in the long run.

- Andrew

The South Africa trip was fun. A lot of enthusiasm there for open standards and open source. They are poised to "skip a generation" and move from paper-based systems to XML, without the intermediate step of proprietary legacy digital systems which have snared so many with vendor lock-in.

In any case, I'm not so sure that NB's changing the rules will help that much. We have bigger problems, namely that the rules that do have are not uniformly enforced. Creating new rules may provide a vent for frustration, but if they also are not followed, then there is not additional benefit.

Also, to the extent that NB decision making is outside of JTC1's jurisdiction, we can create all the rules we want, and even follow them, and a company large enough, and with funds enough to pull in the token participation of a couple dozen island nations and desert dictatorships can override the collected wisdom of the relatively small number of NB's who care about the rules.

As for the US NB, it is hard to say. We certainly have appetites. But I have yet to see signs of an appetite for change.

-Rob

Um, Alex, isn't it wildly inappropriate for the CEO of a neutral international organization to be making dismissive on-the-record comments about a significant in-progress process appeal? In other standards organizations where I've participated, this would be a career-limiting or career-ending move. If I were in the Brazilian or South African NB, I'd be livid with fury.

(Realizes once again that ISO is Really Really Different from other milieux).

@Andrew

A more understandable set of Directives would definitely help, but this stuff is never going to be easy. As for the "baying mob" - they don't seem to me to be that interested in the rules (unless they apply in such a way that it advances their POV).


@Rob

> We have bigger problems, namely that the rules that do have are not uniformly enforced.

Not sure about that (apart from the non-appearance of the new text). I think the problem is more that there are multiple ways of interpreting the Directives, so it is difficult to know what the rules actually are - those who have to apply them are faced with coming up with the most defensible interpretation.

> we can create all the rules we want, and even follow them, and a company large enough, and with
> funds enough to pull in the token participation of a couple dozen island nations and desert dictatorships
> can override the collected wisdom of the relatively small number of NB's who care about the rules.

If there's a problem with token participation, that might be dealt with by some kind of due diligence for new P-members. However, ultimately in International Standardisation it's the Nations that will decide, and they are free to order their affairs as they wish. Historically, of course, this has produced results that have offended vendors of all kinds. For the 29500 project, if you strip the participation list back down to the hard core of long-term XML/document voters, you'll find the same sort of ratio approving as we did in the actual ballot. Countries like Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA hardly count as desert island nations ...


@Tim

Rob Weir mentions above that Alan Bryden had previously announced his retirement as Secretary General at the end of the year - but in any case by my reading he was, is his dismissive remarks about a lack of understanding, clearly commenting on "the negative publicity [which] is quite extreme", not on the appeals. Probably he means the "Microsoft owns ISO" kind of stuff. I don't think the NBs reading this passage will see it as bearing on the bases of their appeals. The only explicit mention of the appeals seems to acknowledge they are open ended ("Irrespective of the outcome of the current appeals [...]").

As to whether the fast track was "abused" - strictly speaking (and contrary to much commentary) the fast track is not "designed for" any particular kind of spec. The Directives state "the criteria for proposing an existing standard for the fast-track procedure is a matter for each proposer to decide". However, I don't think you'll find (m)any NBs who think that putting this spec on the fast track was a good idea. Personally I would like to see both the fast track mechanisms in the JTC 1 process scrapped as a first step to improvement.

ISO is different, and this is in part because the Secretary General is not a "CEO" - this is not (in general) a top-down command structure but one in which the power is held by the members. There is clearly a need for reform and that needs to come from a coordinated consensus of countries who want to see that happen.

- Alex.

@Alex Brown

To put things into a larger perspective: We saw the rise of consortia over the past two decades. Standards of relevance in the web sphere are developed by non-profit consortia. The notion of "open standards" as a performance based criteria is gaining ground. Sure, the ITU-T tries to define "open standards" in a way that all ITU and ISO/IEC standards qualify as beeing "open" and some industry players that prefer rand terms assist that lobbying effort. But speaking of "open standards" is a criticism of established standardization which is not perceived as good enough.

So ISO faces forum shopping driven by industry needs. The only reason why industry takes the ISO road is the official status attached to them. With that official status comes greater responsibility.

There is a real and persistent risk that the official status would be further weakened. It is not bad per se to concentrate on performance based criteria. The EU IDABC that is assumed to have played a decisive role in the initiation of ISO 29500 has been running a CAMSS project. It stands for Common Assessment Method for (EU-)Standards and Specifications. Those persons involved share the criticism that fixed criteria lists may be counter-productive. Likewise the EU Commission considers to recast the old standards regulations to enable referencing of consortia standards by EU procurement. From a June 2008 action plan paper:

Update standardisation policy in the ICT, including a possible revision of Council European Commission Decision 87/95/EEC. The main objective is to allow European Policies and legislation to interact better with the reality of ICT standardisation.

You know very well that there is no anti-ISO movement yet

I wonder how much money IBM and some other parties have been spending on anti-OOXML campaigning though and especially how and on who they have been spending that money.
As we have already seen that the man behind Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth has been funding the no ooxml campaign of the FFII for instance I would be very interested to know how organisations that compete with MS have been spending money on other organized resitance against OOXML.

I would not call it a movement either. I would rather call it a well funded organized campaign.

It's true that many laypeople only looked at rules that could advance their own POV, but then again, rules were rarely explained unless they could advance the explainer's POV. It's entirely possible that the public would be far keener to play nice if they were given more balanced messages.

What would you say to including non-normative text discussing some of the fundamental issues that laypeople have regularly misunderstood? Off the top of my head, that would include the win/win approach, the role of precedent, standardisation as a process rather than an event, and the meaning of "Standard" (e.g. that standardising a document does not imply that the world should be standardise upon it). Such text would be a great labour-saving device next time there's a public outcry, would make it easier for bloggers to do the right thing when trying to explain the issues, and would probably help ISO newbies learn the ropes a bit faster too.

- Andrew

@Andrew

I would be strongly against introducing more informative/explanatory text into the Directives. A good standard should be consistent, terse, and highly normalised in its language. That does not make for an easy read - but has the advantage of "firming up" the more you read it; explanatory text which seems comfy on a first read-through often falls apart as it it studied further.

The right way to do it (and as was mentioned during the BRM) is to adopt the approach of ISO 8879 (SGML) or XML. In both cases the terse standard text is augmented later with explanatory annotation by an expert. In XML's case Tim Bray (who has commented here) produced The Annotated XML Specification.. Needless to say, this is a lot of work.

Ultimately however there are some things which are just hard: flying aeroplanes, listening to Schoenberg, reading Ezra Pound or understanding the detailed rules of an International Standards organisation Granted, the current Directives make it much harder even than it ought to be, but I'd resist the idea that "laypeople" have any right to expect everying in life to be easy-of-access and quickly consumable. As I've mentioned before standards committee members here in the UK have access to training and (informal) mentoring - not to mention a period of learning the ropes.

Also, most of the things you mention ("win/win" etc) are characteristics of International Standardisation rather than rules, and might more properly fall under the heading of "the philosophy of International Standards". Currently there is nothing documenting these but I seriously think the JTC 1 directives would benefit from a preamble of a "we hold these truths to be self-evident" kind which was rather more comprehensive than the current statements limited to consensus.

- Alex.

There is quite good introductory material on ISO at the ISO website at www.iso.ch though the navigation system seems to change regularly. There is very explicit and readable material on, for example:

Using and references ISO and IEC standards for technical regulation
*PDF

Chapter 7 is interesting.

I take your point that laypeople can't be expected to understand everything about ISO rules and procedures after reading a few blog posts, although it seems reasonable to expect prominent bloggers to do some of that hard work before expounding their wisdom. A preamble of first principles and an annotated specification strike me as excellent tools for educating the "interested amateur" demographic that good bloggers are likely to come from. Tim Bray's work certainly helped my amateurish understanding of XML back when I was learning these things.

I suspect that concentrating on educating the interested amateurs would also be more efficient than educating everyone, because different groups of laypeople need different topics explained in different ways. For example, the DIS 29500 debate had a lot of confusion about whether a Standard is a law book or a text book, but very little confusion about whether a Standard is a factual or an ethical statement. I should imagine the debate around the seal-and-dolphin-killing standard had far more ethical than legalistic confusion, so any text aimed at educating both groups would have to spend a long time telling people things they already knew. Bloggers who understand the theory and their audience will know how to explain the things their audience needs to hear, in ways their audience can understand.

- Andrew