How the Game is Played: INCITS V1 Narrowly Votes Down OOXML
Rob Weir reported today that V1, the Technical Committee at standards organization INCITS charged by the Executive Committee of that organization to review office format specifications, has narrowly failed to approve Ecma 376 (formerly Microsoft's OfficeOpen XML formats). (You can read a profile of INCITS that explains how it fits into the standard setting hierarchy here) A number of votes were tried across marathon proceedings, including "approval, with comments," "abstention, with comments," and "disapproval, with comments," all of which failed to garner the necessary 2/3s vote needed to report out a consensus decision.
On April 2nd the INCITS Executive Board asked V1 "to coordinate and develop the U.S. recommended position" on OOXML and to return this recommendation by July 17th. After several meetings, including a two-day face-to-face meeting in Washington, DC in late June, and the recording of over 300 member-submitted comments, V1 voted last Friday….
An important factor in the V1 vote was the large number of members who joined very late in the process. At the start of the year, V1 had only 7 voting members. But by Friday's meeting V1 had 26 voting members. There was a clear pattern in the voting where the long-time V1 members voted for the "Disapproval, with comments" position as well as "Abstention, with comments" while the newer members voted overwhelmingly "Yes, with comments" and against "Abstention with comments." This is not surprising since the new members were largely Microsoft business partners.
The following chart makes this trend clear. As you can see, at the start of the year, V1's membership consisted of seven organizations, six of whom on Friday voted "Disapproval, with comments", and one (Microsoft) who voted "Approval, with comments". The membership spurt came at the very end, in the last month, when 16 new members joined V1. Of these 16 new members, 14 of them voted, "Approval, with comments" on Friday.
<snip>Update, Monday morning: An overnight comment leads me to add this to my over-tired text of last night: Rob Weir goes on to note that the good news is that the many comments should read ISO. To which I would add that this is more significant than might be obvious, given that during the contraditions period, Microsoft was successful in persuading V1 to vote "no contradctions" rather than "no contradictions - with comments." <snip>
I've heard reports of similar membership surges in working groups considering Ecma 376 in the National Bodies of other countries this year as well, and regrettably this type of behavior has also been observed in other organizations, and involving other standards. In the IEEE, for example, a wireless working group was suspended after it was reported that the chair was not acting in a neutral fashion and factions were packing the meetings for voting purposes.
Moreover, the standards process is not as "transparent" as proponents of "open standards" would like us to think. Many National Bodies keep comments and voting confidential, despite the fact that the bodies in question are acting as quasi-governmental bodies to represent national positions in global standards bodies.
The unfortunate fact is that when much is at stake, standard setting can be a pretty rough contact sport. And with more standards underlying more enormous markets, these situations are bound to multiply. Nor is the action limited to standards committees. Where international trade is concerned, standards wars can become trade wars, as nearly happened over the WiFi standard, when China wished to require compliance with its homegrown WAPI standard instead – a face-off that continues to simmer today.
In a better world, this type of warfare and behavior would not exist. But in the case of the current war over format standards, you can expect that the hardball will continue over the coming months. It will be interesting indeed to see the final outcome as the five-month review and comment period winds to a close. That observation applies to the action in the United States as well, which, as Rob reports, ain't over yet.
Note that this is not the final step in developing the US position on OOXML. The next step will be for the INCITS Executive Board to review the comments V1 has generated, and then to determine the US position via a 30-day letter ballot. That, followed by a possible 10-day reconsideration ballot, will take us to the September 2nd deadline for this JTC1 ballot. It is typical practice for INCITS to follow the recommendations of its technical committees. But since the committee of technical experts in V1 was not able to develop a consensus recommendation, it is not clear how the INCITS Executive Board will now make their decision.
Stay tuned.
For further blog entries on ODF and OOXML, click here
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