Into King’s at Dawn
Originally uploaded by alexbrn

Path heading into King’s College Cambridge, taken during a very rosy autumn dawn. HDR.

Again, the tree on the left is useful to cover up the unsightly scaffolding on the chapel. 

Cambridge Backs at Dawn
Originally uploaded by alexbrn

Kings's College chapel still has some ugly scaffolding on it, which means the composition is pretty much dictated by the need to get the tree in the way of it.

HDR image; the river was merged back in from the neutrally-exposed first image (of the 3 image set) with GIMP, so its reflections were not blurry.

Rainy Day in Romsey Town
Originally uploaded by alexbrn

Today is a really grey autumn day here in Cambridge. What I think of as games day weather ("Come on Brown, I want to see those knees muddy").

Much nicer being indoors with a warm laptop ...

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.