[LINK] Australia abstains on Office Open XML vote

[Glen Turner]

On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 07:46 +0930, Janet Hawtin wrote:

> > SA will still be able to vote at the BRM.
> 
> I thought that Abstention meant you were no longer a part of the
> ongoing process.

An Abstain by a P (Participating) National Body allows, but does
not require, attendance and voting at the Ballot Resolution Meeting.

The Abstain does prevent Australia placing Comments before the
Ballot Resolution Meeting. This is particularly ironic since
Standards Australia was keen on Comments which were likely not
to appear before any other ISO National Body.

Having submitted a paper raising substantive comments I am
very annoyed that these will not be subject to consideration
at the Ballot Resolution Meeting. For my concerns to be addressed
I now need to hope that they appear in the Comments by some
other National Body. But if other National Bodies adopted
Standards Australia's stance of seeking unique Comments then
I have no hope of seeing my Comments addressed.  This is
a most unsatisfactory outcome.

Standards Australia, and ISO more generally, should review its
standards-making policies. It has taken a huge international
grass-roots effort to prevent a obviously deficient standard
from progressing through ISO. This cannot be expected every
time a rich multinational company wishes to have its own
technology blessed as an "international standard".  Thanks to
that grass-roots effort ISO and Standards Australia have dodged
a reputation-destroying bullet.  They cannot expected to be so
fortunate every time.


The lack of response to Standards Australia's initial appeal for
experts does not surprise me. The pool of such people in Australia
is extremely limited -- it was only the truly awful specification
work in OOXML that allowed people without a specialisation in
document formats to raise substantive comments.