ISO process secret and dark in Croatia and Serbia

Summary:

Most ISO national bodies are state funded and have the status of public institutions. Nevertheless, they are untransparent when it comes to publish anything usefull to document what has been said in their closed doors meetings on OOXML. This is the case in Croatia and Serbia, but also in most other countries.

ISO process secret and dark in Croatia and Serbia

zoobab 26 Sep 2007 09:27

There is an interesting article in LinuxWorld relating to the wonderful transparency of the ISO process in Serbia and Croatia:

Behavior like this meant that everyone interested in this issue in Croatia had to become informed about the result from outside the country. As we can read on his blog, one of the Croatian Free Software community members tried to reach CSI to find out who is participating in CSI's IT technical board, and the votes of every board member. In response, CSI stated that "guaranties security and secrecy of personal information and obligates that they will not be provided to third parties." CSI also told the Linux user, "The only data available to the public on CSI's Web site is elated to president and secretary of technical board. Informations about voting process and technical board are not available to public". CSI is a public institution. However, information about votes of board members are hidden from Croatian citizens.

And in Serbia, who knows how the standards body manages to study the 6000 pages without even a technical committee:

Because of its slow transition, SIS did not have any technical board or expertise about this issue, as an SIS staffer told one of the Serbian free software community members over the phone. The only communication that happened was that phone call, since SIS turned out to be very hard to reach. Although Croatia's CSI answered e-mail, SIS made no response even to official e-mails from the Free Software Foundation Europe, an organization with a solid base of supporters in Serbia. FSFE also prepared some questions for national standardization bodies on the issue, and translated them to Serbian.

Any impact on this issue from the general public or independent experts was very hard. In the first place, SIS is still being formed, so it is hard to expect that body to do a complicated task such as examining Microsoft's 6000-page OOXML document. Second, there was no public information about this process, since SIS's Web site doesn't contain any information related to OOXML issue at all.