The Ballot Resolution Meeting to discuss the technical comments arising from the fast track process to have Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats accepted as an ISO standard was held last week in Geneva. The object of the BRM is to seek consensus on potential modifications. Opinion is divided as to whether the meeting was a success, however:

(I have noted affiliations in order to provide clarity, but it should be noted that the comments of individuals do not necessarily represent the views of their employers)

“The DIS 29500 ballot resolution meeting (BRM) finished up in Geneva today and was an unqualified success by any measure.”
Jason Matusow, Microsoft senior director of interoperability.

“There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).”
Brian Jones, Microsoft Office program manager.

“Only a very small percentage of the proposed dispositions were discussed in detail, amended and approved by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the ‘Fast Track’ process.”
Andy Updegrove, Consortiuminfo.org

“It was a failure of the Fast Track process, and Ecma for choosing it. It should have been obvious to the administrators that submitting a 6000+ page document which failed the contradiction period, the 5 month ballot vote and poor resolution dispositions, should be pulled from the process. It should have been blatantly obvious that if you force National Bodies to contribute in the BRM and end up not deliberating on over 80% of their concerns, you will make a lot of people very unhappy.”
Yoon Kit, Open Malaysia.

“The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit. I’m not an ISO expert, but whatever their ‘Fast Track’ process was designed for, it sure wasn’t this. You just can’t revise six thousand pages of deeply complex specification-ware in the time that was provided for the process… This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen. Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters.”
Tim Bray, director of web technologies, Sun.

“Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed. It’s like if you had a massive software project and 80% of it was not run through QA.
It’s a big problem. I’ve never seen anything like this, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years.”
Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation.

“80%+ of the resolutions of the BRM were resolved by a ballot, without discussion, without taking into account any dissenting views, without reconciling any arguments. Indeed, there was not any opportunity to even raise an objection to an issue decided by the ballot. Many of the issues were decided in 6-5 or 7-6 split votes, with no discussion. How can that be said to be a consensus? This is an utter failure to follow the cardinal principles of JTC1 process.”
Rob Weir, IBM performance architect.

“As it stands today, the BRM has failed -failed to work, failed to impress, failed to create consensus and failed to succeed. Rules that were not part of the existing JTC-1 corpus had to be invented to come up with the astounding result of 6 countries approving the bulk voting versus 4 countries formally disapproving them, 18 others abstaining, while four others even refusing to vote as a way to show their complete disapproval of the way the BRM was being handled.”
Charles Schulz, Ars Aperta.

Admittedly I am quoting selectively, but you have to wonder whether a ’standard’ that has been through a process that divides opinion so much is worthy of the title, whatever the result. The most damning indictment, in my personal view, comes again from Yoon Kit of the Malaysian delegation:

“We eventually found out that if any changes affected current implementations it would certainly be rejected. This seriously compromised any elegant solutions, and it forced us to be mindful of the ‘existing corpus of documents’ in the wild. I personally don’t believe that that should be our problem, but there was a large and vocal voting bloc which would oppose any changes to the spec which would ‘break’ Ecma 376. This was why appeasing Ecma had to happen. Even though they rushed their Ecma International Standard, and Microsoft took the risk in shipping Microsoft Office 2007 last year, we now have to bear the burden of having to support its limitations.”

UPDATE - Jason Matusow has posted a couple of articles noting the positive views of the Danish and Norwegian delegations, as well as from Rick Jeliffe of the Australian delegation, while Andy Updegrove is constantly updating his post, most recently with information from the Greek delegation. For further details of both sides of the story, stay tuned to those blogs. - UPDATE