[LINK] Australia abstains on Office Open XML vote

[Marghanita da Cruz]

Glen Turner wrote:
> 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.

Hi Glen,

 From memory, you were concerned about the fast track process - shoving the
standard through. An abstention says, to me, that Australia isn't ready to take
a position on the proposed standard. This seems an accurate assessment and response.

Instead of having two international standards covering the same area - perhaps
the position Australia should take is to work from the currently adopted
standard and understand its relation to any other proposals.

It would be of practical use to understand/articulate the 
relationship/role/application of
OOXML,
HTML versions3-5,
PDF...
to ODF, (ISO/IEC 26300, full name: OASIS Open Document Format for Office
Applications - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument)

There is also a scope issue about the best forum to do this in.

Marghanita

> 
> 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.
> 
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-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://www.ramin.com.au
Phone: (+61)0414 869202