Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Summary:

What do engineers do when they observe a problem? They start a project to fix it. A Swiss standard expert who got annoyed by the "Open XML bug" of ISO procedures launched OpenISO.org.

Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

podmokle 05 Sep 2007 13:12

Norbort Bollow, an XML standards specialist from Switzerland, takes action. He participated in the Swiss 'Open XML' review process (their comments) but technical review was obstructed by political interference and commercial interests. Today he started OpenISO.org.

WWW: http://openiso.org/

The vision of OpenISO.org is to become a truly open international standards organization. In particular,

* Decisions between conflicting opinions or interests should always be made in a fact-oriented manner based on sound engineering and openness principles.
* Participation in OpenISO.org work should be open to everyone who is willing and able to work according to a reasonable set of procedural guidelines.
* OpenISO.org will be active both in the area of developing technical specifications which are suitable as standards and in the area of reviewing documents published by other organizations for compliance with principles of good engineering, openness and economic fairness.
* OpenISO.org will be financed primarily by contributions from organizations interested in advancing OpenISO.org's work in a given topic area. Work will always progress as fast as possible subject to the condition that OpenISO.org must be able to ensure (with the available financial resources) adherence to the principles of sound engineering and openness.
* All work documents of OpenISO.org will be made freely available to everyone via the internet, free of charge.

Norbert Bollow gets into some more details in his first mailing list post where he describes his rationale:
http://openiso.org/pipermail/discuss/2007-September/000000.html

Generally speaking, the only way in which the world has ever been changed for the better is by small groups of dedicated people who (mostly) didn't have much in terms of financial resources but who went forward anyway. ..
But is it fair to blame the recent problems on ISO? (After all, the known case of corruption and committee stuffing happened in national standardization organizations, not at ISO.) Well, ISO is a cartel consisting of the so-called national standards organizations. Collectively, the various national organizations which together form ISO did a *lot* wrong.
And I'm getting the impression that a miracle would be required to prevent Microsoft from winning the ISO/IEC JTC1 re-vote after the BRM. Right now OpenISO.org seems to me to be the only promising long-term strategy. This remark is not intended to discourage other reasonable activities, but I do not think that anything we could do is likely to have long-term success unless something like OpenISO.org is part of the strategy.

OpenISO - a startup

Can we realistically expect to be able to compete with ISO and the national standardization organizations? (Certainly they're now also thinking about improving their rules and procedures.) They have several huge structural problems resulting from their membership structure and established fundamentally-broken decision-making rules, problems which a competing start-up organization won't be encumbered with.

Norbert Bollow

• Founder of DotGNU, an implementation of Microsoft technology similar to Mono
• Founder of ThankyouPoland, Truth50 etc.
• President of the Swiss Internet User Group

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (80.177.145.x) 05 Sep 2007 13:23

OOXML was lambasted on this site partly because

(1) It didn't attempt to work with and improve on an existing standards effort (ODF), and
(2) It picked a name confusingly similar to Open Office/Open Document

Now "Open ISO" pulls a parallel stunt. How deliciously ironic!

- Alex Brown.

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

podmokle 05 Sep 2007 13:35

I think Norbert understands the "open" concept.

The general trend in standardization is towards more openness. Standardization may also cause market inefficiency!

The concept of open standards and its reference implementation, the internet, caused a reform process in the Standard Organizations. As the Danish definition of open standards makes clear: Open Standards is an "ideal", as the "free market" or "free trade" or an "open society". As I understand Norbert he wants a kind of GATT for Standard openness. ISO is to bureaucratic to implement internal reforms. So he aims to start some "competition", an alternative review process governed by engineers.

ISO will ensure that its trademark is not abused. OpenISO is the right name for the *political vision*.

Last edited on 05 Sep 2007 13:37 by podmokle Show more

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (195.217.52.x) 05 Sep 2007 13:52

Hmm, mainly OOXML was lambasted because it was a binary dump of one vendor's format, designed and promoted with clear intent to damage the market, not support open competition. The name and the unwillingness to build on ODF were just little droppings; the real problem is the whole bear determined to rip the guts out of the international standards process.

It's about ethics. OpenISO.org is a great idea, and it highlights the fact that we need better processes if we want to produce better standards. To some extent it's ISO's fault if Microsoft can manipulate the rules so much.

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

podmokle 05 Sep 2007 16:02

To some extent it's ISO's fault if Microsoft can manipulate the rules so much.

I disagree. When we ask ourselves about the reason for ethics it is simple: because it pays off. All the security measures are only needed because abuse exist. But security measures also limit overall productivity. Bureaucracy targeted to cut abuse annoys all of us.

A lesson we took from wikipedia. Look at all the content management systems with their permissions hell. Wikipedia allows open editing and most of us found it insane. No, it is not. But of course abuse is possible.

It is not your fault when people harm you. ISO is vulnerable to these kind of attacks. But it is not their moral fault.

Do you know how much is possible with our legal system? If you *want* you can sue your neighbors or ensure that almost no negative reporting is made, all of this is possible. It is the right method to make friends. Our legal system works because most people don't abuse the system.

But technically ISO needs procedural reforms.

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

alemp 05 Sep 2007 14:44

Another utopia of the same kind recently became reality :

The Academic Libraries struggled with the rocketing cost of the commercial rights to scientific papers.
However, those papers are mainly produced by their own academic researchers, with public funds; indeed the publication cost represents only a small part of the total cost of a typical scientific paper.

To break free from the abusive commercial ties, PLoS (Public Library of Science) was created with success (www.plos.org).

See for ex. the comments at http://www.plos.org/oa/plosart.html :

Paying to Free Science: Costs of Publication as Costs of Research
Andy Gass
Available online 12 May 2005
Many proponents of open access to journal articles online view costs of publication as
an essential yet minor component of the cost of conducting research in the life
sciences. Author-side charges for publication in open-access journals in those fields
should, therefore, be paid principally by the agencies and foundations that fund
research. Recent analyses of the potential cost-to-institution of a widespread
transition away from purchasing subscriptions to scholarly journals and towards
paying open-access publication fees on behalf of affiliated faculty must be amended to
reflect the reality that third-party funding agencies already pay the bulk of such fees in
the life sciences, and will likely continue to do so.

Last edited on 05 Sep 2007 14:46 by alemp Show more

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (190.136.107.x) 06 Sep 2007 22:13

i would donate to openiso.org, i believe it is a smart response to all this corruption at ISO standardization processes

may be the honest and serious NBs could join openiso.org,,,

wounderful idea Norbert, and all my support

Franco Merletti ( software developer )

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (125.60.240.x) 08 Sep 2007 05:14

OpenISO can be a haven for a truly "OPEN" standard. While ISO may have standards that have the encumbrance of royalty/patent fee.

OpenISO can be a place to enumerate guidelines of what constitute "OPEN"ness in technology. As a starting point we can have reviewers of approved ISO standard and list only those that passes the principle of "OPEN"ness together with the specs document.

OpenISO is a timely move to push for a more transparent process and the spirit of collaboration among different industries.

Further in my listins are:
Linux Standard Base
XOrg
ODF (?)
SVG
HTML

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (193.176.0.x) 10 Sep 2007 12:51

"OpenISO.org will be financed primarily by contributions from organizations interested in advancing OpenISO.org's work in a given topic area."
What would happen if Microsoft finances OpenIso.org regarding OOXML?

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (24.72.211.x) 10 Sep 2007 13:47

I like the idea of having standards open and free, but having two International Standards working toward similar goals could very well defeat the purpose of standards.

I hope that when ISO meets in Feb. they will look very closely at the comments. Now I don't understand how all the voting works, I would hope the main ISO group can and will decide not to allow OOXML to be a standard based on technical merit. If this does happen, then ISO will save their credibility as an International Standard that deserves respect. And if this does happen, I would like to see this site as a staging area, one in which technical problems can be found and fixed before proceeding to any standards committees.

I don't blame ISO for the problems that have recently developed. The ECMA is the group that accepted OOXML as a standard without complete documentation. They are the ones that developed a fast track to ISO acceptance. ECMA should not have even put OOXML on the fast track without the full documentation required for a standard in the first place. As far as I'm concerned, ECMA has lost all credibility with me.

Re: Norbert Bollow starts OpenISO

Anonymous (75.108.226.x) 11 Sep 2007 03:12

ISO should have a rule that no company engaging in the sort of manipulation Microsoft engaged in will be allowed a vote in ISO. Hopefully that would put a stop to this sort of shenanigans.