An Antic Disposition

Former Microsoft consultant Rick Jelliffe has posted his own particular brand of science fiction/fantasy, this time in his favorite subgenre, a parody of a drug-induced psychosis, where after uneasy slumber Rick awakes in some alternate parallel universe and finds that JTC1/SC34 is open and transparent and OASIS is closed, and decides to write a rambling blog post about it.

If you like unintentional humor, you will enjoy reading Rick's over-the-top post.

Rick suggests that organizationally JTC1/SC34 is a more participatory environment for developing standards than OASIS.

JTC1's process, based on National Body voting is both effective ... and more genuinely open, because it is impossible to stack either directly or indirecty.

Let's test that proposition. Let's compare OASIS and JTC1/SC34.

Who can participate? In OASIS, anyone can participate, from any company, organization, government agency, non-profit corporation in the world. Or you can join as an unaffiliated individual, as many have. You don't need your government's permission to join. You just do it. Most join with a nominal membership fee ($300 for individuals) but membership grants are available in some cases, when the fee would be burden for active individual contributors.

What about participation in JTC1/SC34? First, you must be a member of your NB. How do you become a member of your NB? In the US the price is $1,200 and you must be representing a company or organization. Individuals? Sorry, you are not allowed to participate. In other countries the rules vary. In some cases membership is not available at all at any price. You are essentially wait-listed until an opening becomes available. (Sorry, we don't have enough seats, we heard in Portugal). In some countries, like China, membership is forbidden to native citizens who are employees of foreign subsidiaries in China. In other countries you can't join at all. It is entirely a government decision. So, good luck joining the NB of Syria, where the constitution has been suspended under emergency rule since 1963. (But somehow they managed to make time to vote on the OOXML ballot. Zimbabwe as well, that paragon of open participation.)

Now, it is entirely possible for a standards organization to appear open, but in practice to be inaccessible. So we must look at the complete cost of participation, not just the initial membership fees.

The OASIS ODF TC does its work entirely on an email list, a wiki, and via weekly phone calls, which are toll-free calls for most participants. I don't recall there ever being a face-to-face meeting, certainly not so long as I've been a member. This use of technology lowers the barrier to participation, so anyone can be effective on the TC if they wish. In particular it makes it easier for those who have day jobs and can only contribute to the mailing list during non-work hours.

What about JTC1/SC34? To participate effectively requires attendance at several international meetings each year (Plenary's, WG's, Ad-hocs, BRM's, etc.), as well as participation at NB meetings. Since many of the participants are representative of large corporations or government agencies, a junket mentality prevails and the meetings are often held in some of the most expensive places in the world: Geneva, Granada, London, Kyoto, Jeju Island, etc.

JTC1 does not allow meeting participation by telephone. Since important votes, are held at these meetings, and no provision is made for remote participation, one cannot effectively participate in JTC1/SC34 without a substantial budget for international travel. Attendance at a single meeting — the DIS 29500 BRM — was $3687.52 for me, and I flew coach and ate cheap. How many standards meetings like that can you as an individual or your small company afford per year?

Further, note the nature of your membership — what can you actually do? Can you vote? In OASIS, it is one person/one vote. In the TC, your vote as an individual with a $300 membership fee is counted exactly the same as my vote representing an OASIS Foundational Sponsor. At the organizational level, it is one company/one vote, and the smallest OASIS member organization has exactly the same vote as the largest.

In JTC1/SC34 however, you typically can't vote at all. NB's vote, not individuals, not companies. So your opinion and your wishes are subject to the will of your NB. If your opinion varies from your NB's, you may not be accredited to attend an international meeting, and even if you are able to attend you may not be allowed to speak your opinions. This extra level of indirection and censorship means that you, as an individual, can do little. And to the extent your NB's committee is stacked by a single vendor and their partner community, or your NB decides to overrule or ignore its technical committee, or Microsoft calls your head of state to change the NB's vote, or any of the dozens of other documented shenanigans that recently occurred, your entire membership fee and participation will be an entire waste of time, money and effort.

Membership is OASIS is far more open and inclusive. You join. You discuss. You vote. Period. In JTC1/SC34, you are mired in layers of bureaucracy at the national and international level, in a system crafted by and for the big boys to cut back room deals and manipulate the process to the benefit of large corporations.

(Now that isn't to say that there are not some individual consultants out there who thrive in the JTC1 environment by mastering its dark, dusty, demon-haunted hallways. Even the largest corporations occasionally have need of this expertise, as Rick and others are quite aware. If JTC1/SC34 were truly open and transparent, such skills would not be needed. You certainly don't see anyone selling their services to help companies navigate OASIS, do you?)

What about transparency? As Rick demonstrates, OASIS meeting minutes and agenda are all posted and public. So is our mailing list. So are all of our drafts. So is our member and public comments.

But in JTC1/SC34, most of the documents are private, only accessible to SC34 members by password. And then occasionally JTC1 will step in prevent SC34 from releasing their own work , suppressing documents even from their own SC members. There are no public comments to speak of, and member comments on draft standards are secret.

So when you are back from your "trip", Rick, please let us know again, who wins on openness, participation and transparency?

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And for the record, a couple of outright deceptions in Rick's post:

• Rick says that there are 80 NB's, and thousands people participating in JTC1, but only 13 people participating on the ODF TC. This is a particularly inept comparison. Why is he comparing all of JTC1 to a single OASIS TC? If you look at OASIS overall, you will see that OASIS has more than 5,000 participants, representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries. The ODF TC itself has 53 members, including 7 members of JTC1/SC34.
• Rick picks a "random" ODF TC minutes post from a year ago to attempt to suggest domination by a single company. Not so random a choice, methinks. It was a rare joint meeting of the ODF TC and the Metadata subcommittee, which brought in a far greater number of Sun employees than typically participate in a call.
  

Labels: FUD, OASIS, ODF, OOXML

I work in a house with glass walls. Not literally, of course. The cost to air-condition such a house would be prohibitive. I mean that working on standard in OASIS is a public act, with process transparency and public visibility. The public doesn't see merely the end-product, or quarterly drafts, they can see (if they are so inclined) every discussion, every disagreement and every decision made by the TC, in near real-time. Our meeting minutes for our TC calls are posted for public inspection. Our mailing list archives, where most of the real work occurs, is there for the public to view. The comments submitted by the public are also available for anyone to read. This information is all archived from when the TC first met back in 2002, all the way to the discussions we're having today on spreadsheet formula namespaces.

One result of this openness is that it is very easy, trivial even, for our critics to simply read our mailing list, look for a disagreement or discussion of an issue, and repeat our words, usually out of context. Cut & Paste. This is certainly the most efficient way to criticize ODF since it minimizes the amount of thinking required. However, this is a bit tedious, especially when this is applied so asymmetrically, as I shall now explain.

Ecma TC45, the committee producing Office Open XML (OOXML), does not operate in such a transparent manner. They do not have a public mailing list archive. They have not published their meeting minutes. The comments they receive from the public are not open for the public to read. The public has no idea what exactly the TC is working on, what issues they think are critical, whether the TC is in unanimous agreement, whether there is spirited debated or whether Microsoft dominates and determines everything. The fact that they have not yet sent OOXML for an Ecma vote is proof that believe the specification is not yet ready for standardization. But we know no details of what exactly is lacking, what problems are being fixed or, more importantly, what defects are being allowed to remain.

And in this way, the ODF-bashers take advantage of our openness, while holding their deliberations in obscurity. They throw rocks at our glass house while hiding in the shadows.

So this openness at OASIS has an apparent downside. But honestly, I wouldn't trade it for any alternative. Making a standard, especially one this important, is a privilege, not a right. The public deserves to know how a standard is made, the same way and for the same reasons they deserve to know how legislation is made. I relish this scrutiny because I know it makes us stronger.

Sun's Simon Phipps has posted his keynote from the recent OSCON conference. The topic was the “Zen of Free” and, among other goodies, Phipps lists 5 requirements for “full support for fully open standards”, of which I quote the 4th, since it states the point better than I have:

…the standard [Phipps here speaking generically and not about any specific standard] should have been created transparently. Just as an open source community looks with concern on a large, monolithic code contribution, so we should be wary of standards created without the opportunity for everyone to participate or, failing that, with a full explanation of every decision that was made in its construction. Without that there's a chance that it's designed to mesh with some facility or product that will be used to remove our freedom later.

Another way to attack openness is to do it with legal restrictions. For example, we're seeing many references to a year-old performance evaluation of an atypical spreadsheet file, and using that to make the ridiculous claim that the ODF format itself is too slow. I'd love to dispute that claim and show it for what it is. I'd love to show that for most common document sizes, ODF documents are actually smaller and faster to load and save than OOXML documents. I'd love to show you all this, but I can't. Why? Because Microsoft won't let me. The only implementation of OOXML is the Office 2007 beta, and the End User License Agreement (EULA) has this language:

7. SCOPE OF LICENSE. …You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft’s prior written approval

So, our critics can quote benchmark results about ODF running in OpenOffice, but we can't quote numbers about OOXML running in Office. They can read our mailing lists and quote us discussing ODF issues as we address them, but we cannot even see what they are working on.

What should we make of all this? I suggest that no specification is perfect. That's why we have version numbers. The question you need to ask yourself is: what leads to a better specification, full and open public discussion and scrutiny? Or something rushed through behind closed doors? You know what the issues with ODF are, and you'll continue to hear the same small list over and over again. But this is a shrinking list, as the ODF TC experts address these issues. But do you know what the issues with OOXML are, the reasons why Ecma TC45 has not yet put forward their specification as an Ecma standard? What do their experts say when speaking candidly about their specification? The public simply doesn't not know. Do we assume silence means perfection? I don't think so.

Labels: Ecma, OASIS, ODF, OOXML