I was glad you picked up on the comment about ISO/IEC creating voluntary standards (for technical standards): the ISO website has ramped up its material on this aspect too. (It specifically mentions ISO does not make laws or regulations, and so on.)

A lot of people seem to be saying “Oh, after this we seriously don’t think that we should just accept ISO standards ahead of other choices automatically” and my answer (and, indeed, I think it would be ISO’s too) is “Good! Finally people are being realistic”.

The ISO standards process is not like a talent show, where all possible forms are critiqued and tested and there is one winner. Instead, the process is a forum for people who want a technology to get some kind of documentation QA and formalized stakeholder review and basic IPR clarifation from the particpants. At the end, when the stakeholders get an agreement, the document gets an ISO number and stamp.

So when looking at whether a process (such as a procurement process) should favour ISO standards, the issue should be “how important acually is documentation QA, international stakeholder review and IPR clarification for this process”? It is entirely probable that there are (government procurement) processes which favour adopting ISO on an incorrect basis: for example, that the technology is necessarily technically preferable to non-standard alternatives (or alternatives from the boutique consortia.)

Of course, we try to make standards technically excellent, too. When I asked James Clark why RELAX NG should become a standard, his reply was “Because it is technically excellent.” But some standards are based on “Lets make something beautiful” and other are based on “Lets describe what is, even if it is ugly” and so have very different criteria for being judged.

Am particularly pleased by you taking the initiative of following our kiwi cousins efforts to actively contribute to the debate.

Thanks also to Jeff for the OSIA representation. Brendan’s work in this area has been a good thing TM - but as none of the OSIA people were available to attend it was brilliant to have someone there who could passionately and accurately cover the issues.

http://holloway.co.nz/sydney-talk.pdf

• DrawingML is documented as part of DIS29500.
• I didn’t say it was “trivial” for mature Open Source projects to implement it, just that as a result of hundreds of man years of global, open, collaborative reverse engineering work and the fact that OOXML is substantially an XML rendering of a product-derived format, it would be easier than some have suggested. It will be an expensive exercise to work with the format regardless, which will have an impact on Australian small business and government.

i would say he is probably just pro-”creating new ISO standards-no matter how broken it is-will fix everything”