The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) have been busily running a campaign called noooxml, and encouraging people to sign a petition asking the national members of ISO to vote "NO" to DIS 29500.

The site says “it is urgent that you contact your standardisation body in your country and explain them why OOXML is broken” and warns “OOXML passes if 66% of the voting P-Members vote Approve, and no more than 25% of the total vote (P-Members plus ISO plus IEC) vote Disapprove”.

I don't think this is factually correct, and I don't think the petitioning effort makes too much sense. Here's why...

A Caveat

I should first say that the opinions below represent my own understanding of the onward standardisation process, and that much of this process is new and untested for this kind of standard. That said, I don't know of any better readings than the one I am presenting, which has been reached after a careful reading of the JTC 1 Directives and discussion with ISO national body participants from a number of countries.

Countries Cannot Vote (just) "NO"

At least, not without qualification. The three permitted votes are described in section 9.8 of the Directives:

Non-technical Comments Are Ignored

[Update, 3 August 2007: The JTC 1 chair, Scott Jameson, has clarified that nobody could hinder national bodies to express any comments they want. This means that non-technical comments may indeed be made!]

The wording above is important. Disapproval shall be “for technical reasons to be stated” This means that a good portion of the comments in the noooxml petition simply cannot figure in a country's voting position, and would be ruled out-of-order if they did.

Also, a disapproving vote has to be accompanied by technical reasons with “proposals for changes that would make the document acceptable”. Thus there is really no kind of absolute “no” only a conditional “yes”. The period for absolute objections was the one month review period at the beginning of the Fast Track process ... we have moved on from that.

It's the BRM, Stupid!

The noooxml site claims that OOXML will pass if the JTC 1 voting criteria are met in the upcoming ballot, but this is not necessarily the case. It's not even clear from the JTC 1 Directives whether the votes from this ballot are even counted. Instead what happens is explained in section 13.6 (abbreviations: SC = standards commitee; NB = national body):


No mention is made of the success or failure of the standard here — the only time this is alluded to is back in section 9.8 which states “if these [JTC 1 voting] criteria are not met initially, but are subsequently met at the conclusion of ballot resolution [meeting] ... the DIS ... is approved”.

So what's happening is that all national comments are combined to form an international pool, and the countries are asked to consider them in their totality. It is these combined comments which form the basis for discussion at a ballot resolution meeting (BRM) which the SC34 secretariat may, at its discretion, call. Note that the secretariat's power of discretion here is absolute. It may take the view (as was taken with Ecma 372) that the comments are “not resolvable”, in which case the process stops and the Fast Track process fails.

Thus it is the ballot resolution meeting, likely to happen early in 2008, which will be the forum in which it is likely DIS 29500's fate will eventually be decided.

Who Attends The BRM?

Now, the arithmetic of this meeting is involved.

First off we have the National Body members of SC34 (a constituency which is growing fast):



Next, there are the nay-sayers:



and ... that's it. These are the only participants who have to attend. It's quite likely this group of attendees will be preponderantly skeptical about DIS 29500 – the “nay-sayers” are, after all, those whose objections must be overcome for their vote to become a “yes”.

What isn't clear is how many of the “yes” voting countries will attend the BRM. They don't have to. Yet if, during the meeting, consensus breaks down and a vote needs to be taken, then their presence becomes arithmetically important. With approx 150 coutries potentially involved in the vote, the meeting could become quite large ...

And the Lesson Is?

Ultimately, it is likely technical questions which will decide the fate of DIS 29500, and - specifically - whether they will be resolvable by the nations participating in the standardisation process. To influence this process constructively, people need to have submitted good technical comments through the channels their national body will have made available. I am confident, in the UK at least, this has been done.

Hand-waving, lobbying and publicity stunts, in contrast, have little impact on the ISO standardisation process, which is designed to be proof against such things. Campaigns like noooxml generate a lot of excitement but ultimately, I think, don't serve the best interests even of those who, for quite legitimate reasons, want to influence OOXML's progress.