Comments on: Norway and Germany, There Are No Irregularities

By: Fredrik E. Nilsen

Fredrik E. Nilsen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:04:40 +0000

Regarding the alleged irregularities in Norway:

Roger Frost from ISO is quoted in NY Times:

Mr. Frost said he had received Mr. Pepper’s complaint, but upon investigation considered the Norwegian dispute to be an internal matter. “We have received background information from them and have no reason to question the validity of their vote,” Mr. Frost said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/technology/01cnd-soft.html?ex=1364788800&en=60d18984cf40b9d6&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

By: oliver

oliver — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:00:14 +0000

She actually laughed a little and explained that some standards involved rooms full of lawyers discussing something like building codes or other legal matters, the discussions around DIS29500 didn’t appear to phase her all that much.

For context, the conversation started with me apologizing for the strong and heated debate she was seeing on the technical commitee for that particular country.

Many of the standards bodies are frequent participants in much more complex discussions than standardization of document formats.

By: gopi

gopi — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:37:36 +0000

So the argument seems to be,
“Don’t complain about the decision, we followed the procedures correctly. At this stage it was too late to vote ‘No’ if the standard had problems.”

And the argument is being made by the people who are being accused of doing things inappropriately.

Did the person giving you their sage advice mention whether the “extreme conflict” they were used to dealing with included the kind of political lobbying that Microsoft did, or merely the quite common technical disputes that techies get involved in?

The tone of your post seems to imply that the level of dispute and disagreement about this standard is actually normal and expected. I’ve never seen such an immense amount of rancor over a standard since RAMBUS and the JEDEC SDRAM fiasco.

Do you know of any other standards that have had this level of lobbying and dispute?

By: Stu

Stu — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:58:13 +0000

Standards Norge does more to damage their reputation with THAT response than any of the alleged process that led up to their decision.

By: ZDNet Government mobile edition

ZDNet Government mobile edition — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:07:22 +0000

[...] Oliver bell has a great post about the irregularities in Germany and Norway, including a chilling response from Standard Norge about their process: 8. … The leader of the committee has an important role succeed in creating agreement, but the leader of the committee had already in 2007 flagged his position which meant that he could no longer meet the criteria for neutrality. He had therefore renounced his task to lead the committees consideration of OOXML and Standad Norges deputy managing director therefore led meetings for consideration of this matter in the committee. [...]

By: Eric White's Blog

Eric White's Blog — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:44:57 +0000

Standards Norway Responds to Allegations…

Steven McGibbon notes that Standards Norway have posted a press release “Standard Norges behandling av…