… Big …

For those who missed it, last week ISO announced the appointment of a new Secretary General from 2009, Mr Rob Steele. By reputation Mr Steele is something of a moderniser, widely held to have had a very positive impact at Standards New Zealand in his role there as CEO. His written opinions too speak of somebody engaged with the challenges faced within international standardisation today. It is to hoped that from his lofty perch within ISO he will also be a force for the good in facilitating the necessary change JTC 1 so badly needs.

… and Small …

By zooming down from the Secretary General through three levels of subcommittee we can end up at the shiny new working group of SC 34’s WG 4, established for the maintenance of IEC/ISO 29500 (aka OOXML). I was delighted to learn recently that Denmark’s excellent Jesper Lund Stocholm has been appointed as Dansk Standard’s technical expert for this WG (kudos to CIBER for supporting this work). It is great to see this kind of independent expertise coalescing around this important new standard. Excitement is already mounting about this group’s first meeting scheduled to take place in Okinawa in January 2009, alongside WG 5 which is concentrating on document interop. Did I really hear it right that one country is considering sending a delegation of 6 experts to Okinawa?

Jesper Lund Stocholm