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