Here is the UK proposal to create a new maintenance Working Group inside SC34:
UK Proposal for establishing a new WG within SC34
The UK considers that the recent interest in the standardization of office document interchange formats has proved problematic at the working group level within SC34.
The interests of the large numbers of people interested in this area are difficult to reconcile with WG1's ongoing interest in less application-specific information description, particularly in XML validation. Those with an interest in office documents are not necessarily best served by discussing XML validation technology; those interested in XML validation do not necessarily want to work on Office document formats.
As a solution to this, the UK judges that future work on reviewing and maintaining office document interchange formats could be more efficiently handled by a new Working Group, WG4, that could be established within SC34 for handling "Office Information Languages".
SC34/WG4 would be responsible for languages and resources for the description and processing of digital office documents. The set of such documents includes (but is not limited to) documents describing memoranda, letters, invoices, charts, spreadsheets, presentations, forms and reports.
WG4 would be expected to work on the maintenance of, for example:
* ISO/IEC 26300:2006
* ISO/IEC 29500 (should it exist)and be responsible for reviewing any future office document formats.
ECMA/Microsoft will get some troubles to have the maintenance of the future OOXML standard.
But the story of the membership of SC34 might be of the same taste as the committee stuffing in Sweden: maybe most several ISO delegations at SC34 has already been bought by the stuffers?
ECMA/Microsoft may already control the SC34 with their new puppet countries that recently joined. The question is: "When will it backfire? After or before Kyoto?":
Let us hope the new National Bodies discharge their voting responsibilities in future (the situation is gradually improving). If not, I understand the wheels are already in motion to sanction serial offenders by demoting them to observer status within ISO/IEC.
This quote is from Alex Brown's webblog, the covenor of the Ballot Resolution Meeting. I hope the ISO wheels are fast enough to get the backfire on time to save SC34 from stagnation.