Consultations are an excellent opportunity to provide input to regulators and get in touch with a political process. It may sound off-topic here but many of us learned only recently about the importance of the WTO technical barriers to Trade Agreement and general political frameworks in standard bodies. Procedural and voting rules played a more important rule at ISO than expertise. Public ICT1 policy and regulation matters for our business and we should not leave it to the weedheads in suits that provide bureacrats and politicians with phrase carpets.
So what's the news. The European Union DG InfoSoc reaches out and has some questions on standard policy as well.2 Some of them could be of your concern, e.g.:
a) Do you support the Commission view that the issue of divergent standards could be alleviated if more emphasis was put on international pre-competitive industrial research collaboration? What concrete actions could help in encouraging third countries' decision makers to facilitate their industries' international cooperation in view of developing new standards? Which countries/regions should be given priority and which areas of standardisation should be addressed?
b) The Commission is undertaking initiatives for proactive standard marketing promotion in third countries. What would be your priorities related to standards promotion? On which countries/regions these initiatives should be focused? What would be the respective responsibilities of the Commission and the Member States in this field?
c) Has your organisation been involved in processes which resulted in adopting common standards? How could the Commission support the participation of European industry in these processes?
d) How would you assess the impact of those EU research projects whose objective was to “disseminate” an EU standard?
…
a) What should be the modalities for an EU action in IPRs licensing of key technologies in the context of international co-operation?
b) What are the incentives that should be put in place and/or supported at EU-level, in order to facilitate IPR patenting and licensing efforts, particularly from SMEs and start-ups?
c) According to your experience, which technologies suffer the most from the lack of fair and equitable IPR regimes, discriminating fair competition at international level?
…and many other issues such as RFID. Deadline for your submissions or comments to the European Commission is Sept 29.
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=3475
You still don't see the relation to OOXML? Well, some persons were aware of OOXML's brokenness as of October or earlier. In January we wrote a letter and asked the standard bodies not to chose the fast-track. It was a kind of drive-by writing. Alberto is a great document format expert and knew very much about OOXML. We are pleased to see that confirmed by so many standard bodies. OOXML was not ready as a "standard".
It always saves a whole lot of time to start activities in early stages. But in early stages of a debate no one is alerted except those people who observe it professionally (and FFII infomaniacs). It requires great efforts to stop or redirect a running train. I wonder if I should start to hate ECMA for how much of your precious time they consume with their standard process, a standard proposal set on the wrong track.
"While a certain number of errors is understandable in any large specification, the sheer volume of errors indicates that the specification has not been through a rigorous technical review before becoming an Ecma standard, and therefore may not be suitable for the fast-track process." (http://surguy.net/articles/ooxml-validation-and-technical-review.xml)
The best thing for contributors to do is to adopt an issue of public ICT policy no one else cares about and that is in an infant stage. The EU consultation is one of the potential activities but there are so many of them. Someone needs to care and save others a whole lot of their precious time or ensure real benefit. I am not running out of important issues, there are just far to many of them.
