The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings.  Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Research, investigate, and make recommendations on how electronic documents can be created, maintained, exchanged, and preserved by the state in a manner that encourages appropriate government control, access, choice, interoperability, and vendor neutrality. The committee shall consider, but not be limited to, public access to information, expected storage life of electronic documents, costs of implementation, and savings.

Updated again 4/9:  The International Herald Tribune now has a story here, which begins:

Roughly 60 data experts staged a rare and noisy street demonstration in downtown Oslo on Wednesday to protest the adoption of Microsoft Corp.'s document format as an international standard and against Norway voting for the move.

And also the first video is available here.

Updated 4/9:  Aslam Raffee has posted two pictures and some brief notes on the Oslo protest.  You can find the full text here and here.  Many more pictures are here and here.  From the pictures, it appears that they had a large and enthusiastic turnout, and press coverage as well. Geir Isene has now also posted a blog entry, with the full text of Demonstration Convenor Steven Pepper's speech here.  Here are some excerpts from Pepper's speech:

Friends, Bloggers, Free Coders, Supporters of Open Standards!

We are not here today in order to bash Microsoft.

–We are here because we believe in open standards.

We are not even here today because we are opposed to OOXML.

–We are here because we are opposed to OOXML as an ISO standard.

We are not here because we want to discredit the ISO.
We are here because we want to defend ISO’s integrity.

–We are here because we want to draw attention to the scandalous behaviour of the people in Standard Norway whose job it is to represent Norwegian users and software vendors.

And we are here because we want to prevent the adoption of a damaging IT standard in Norway....

Not so very long ago, most standards were set in a largely collegial atmosphere by career professionals who met in face to face meetings over a period of years.  Along the way, they came to know each other as individuals, and established relationships that helped the process move forward and allowed for productive give and take.

While this process was not without its back scratching and game playing, at least the impact on interests other than those directly involved tended to be limited.  After all, if performance standards for light bulbs had settled out at 45, 65 and 95 watts rather than 40, 60 and 90, no end user’s ox would have been gored on the desktop, when it came to lighting.

During these more collaborative times, those that defined the rules for organizations such as ISO, IEC and ANSI (the American National standards Institute) tended not to favor simple majority voting to determine outcomes.  Instead, they put a high value on consensus, in order to lessen the chance that minority interests would be oppressed, or important technical matters ignored.  Other rules required that compliant processes provide a means whereby specific technical decisions could be appealed, so that the consensus process could not be abused.

The rules that included these principles were fairly high level, and often less than legally precise.  For the most part, this worked well enough over time, and allowed an already necessarily slow, surface mail-based process (in pre-Internet days) to move a bit faster than it otherwise would have if more detailed process protections were in place.

In much of the standards development world, which encompasses every area of products, services and activity, this is still largely the way the standards systems operates.  But sadly, that is no longer the case where information and communications technology (ICT) standards are created.

This is now:  What we have just witnessed with the OOXML adoption process is the catastrophic failure of a system built for one purpose that has been subjected to forces that it was not designed to withstand.  Those forces included intense pressure from vendors, and even political pressure.  The tactics utilized appear to have included taking advantage of rules crafted to foster openness, placing or outmaneuvering committee chairs, and recruiting employers to pressure committee members to vote their employers’ interests rather than their own technical judgment.

Yesterday, I sent out the latest issue of my eJournal, Standards Today.  Not surprisingly, it focused on the OOXML process, and what can be learned from it.  Below is the Editorial, and you can  find the complete issue here.  You can sign up for a free subscription here.
Updated:  ISO has now issued its confirmatory press release.  The full text (less biolerplate) is appended at the end of this entry.  I note with some interest that the press release includes the following language:

Subject to there being no formal appeals from ISO/IEC national bodies in the next two months, the International Standard will accordingly proceed to publication.

My editorial in that issue was prophetically titled The Overwhelming of ISO/IEC JTC1, due to the fact that only one week had been allocated to resolving more than 1,100 separate comments (some 900 of them substantive) that had been registered by National Bodies from around the world during the voting period that failed to approve OOXML during the initial balloting period in mid-2007.

Without exception, every fear that I raised in that editorial was realized, and worse. Here is a sampling:

Updated:  (8:45 AM EDT 4/1):  OOXML has  been adopted

Updated:  (1:45 OM EDT 3/31): Reuters has just reported that ISO will not announce the results of the OOXML vote until Wednesday April 2

Updated (3:30 PM EDT 3/29):  Unless thus-far unannounced votes that were formerly "approve" or "abstain" switch to "disapprove," it appears that OOXML will be approved.  See details in the cumulative "updates" section below

Tomorrow is the last day that a National Body (NB) can change its vote on OOXML.  Only a few NBs have announced what they have decided, and of those, not enough have changed their votes to reverse the outcome of last summer, in which DIS 29500 (a/k/a OOXML) failed to gain approval.  It will not be until Monday that the final vote will be announced by ISO/IEC JTC1 (or become public through disclosure by an NB committee member, as the case may be).

Many journalists and others have asked me whether I have a prediction on what the outcome will be, and also what I think it will mean if OOXML is approved.  I don’t have an answer to the first question, as there are too many countries involved, and too much may change until the last minute.  But I do have an answer to the second question, and that answer is the same one that I have given every time that a new decision point has loomed in the ongoing quest for a useful format standard that can bring competition and innovation back to the desktop, as well as ensure that the history and creativity of today will remain accessible far into the future.

That answer is this:  if anyone had asked me to predict in August of 2005 (the date of the initial Massachusetts decision that set the ODF ball rolling) how far ODF might go and what impact it might have, I would never have guessed that it would have gone so far, and had such impact, in so short a period of time.  I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens with the OOXML vote is likely to have little true impact at all on the future success of ODF compliant products.