The recent vote on the OOXML draft standard revealed a number of problems with the ISO procedures, at national as well as international level.
The national procedures have been often accused of being influenced by Microsoft, especially in Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the US.
Protests about Microsoft exerting improper influence on the results of the vote have been made in Poland and Switzerland, the latter voting in favour of OpenXML, despite the fact that the EDRI-member SIUG (Swiss Internet User Group) has pointed out a number of irregularities in the voting process and that a large number of Microsoft partner companies have joined the standardization committee a short time before the debate.
An attempt to influence the Swedish vote was revealed by the open-source community, when a leaked memo showed that Microsoft asked partners to influence the vote but had also offered to pay them to do so. The memo from Microsoft offered partners "marketing support" and "additional support in the form of Microsoft resources" in return for joining the Swedish national body.
Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft accepted the fact that the company was very active in promoting the standard : "Government agencies and national standards bodies have exercised their right to participate in this process, as have a number of companies, including those opposed to and those in favour of Open XML. Therefore, Microsoft has openly encouraged its partners to participate where they have an interest.(...)Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that a Microsoft employee in Sweden communicated with two partner companies about their participation in the Open XML vote in a way that was inconsistent with corporate policy and guidance. "
In the end. the Swedish Standards Institute has revoked its decision in favour of an endorsement of the OOXML as an ISO standard after receiving information that one member had enlisted more than one vote.
An interesting study made by the EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Finland has looked into these problems, including sudden interest from countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Colombia, Côte-d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Lebanon and Malta to the OOXML issue that was considered to be suspicious. "We studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries. We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal. We used the Transparency International's 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index as a measure of corruption."
Individual persons, such as blogger Andy Updegrove, criticised the voting procedure, complaining on the "irregularities reported from some countries have cast a shadow over the credibility of the ISO process. For the standards organisation, it is therefore of particular importance to demonstrate the validity and integrity of the final result, otherwise it threatens to damage the whole system."
An open letter to ISO from Geir Isene, CEO FreeCode International, points out many of the problems encountered during the process : "The fact that ISO enforces no standard for national bodies opens the standardization process for manipulation or corruption.(...) I strongly urge ISO to adopt a strict policy for its members detailing the rules for how a national body shall determine its vote in ISO and that it enforces such policy vigorously." Irsene also suggests that "within the field of IT, ISO would greatly benefit from adopting the IETF requirement of two independent reference implementations for passing a standard. This should increase the quality of ISO's IT standards."
The result of the closed-door ISO process called to action. Norbert Bollow has set up OpenISO.org, a truly open international standards organization, where all work documents will be made freely available to everyone via the Internet and decisions between conflicting opinions or interests should always be made in a fact-oriented manner based on sound engineering and openness principles.
Microsoft accused of rigging OOXML votes (30.08.2007)
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39288959,00.htm?r=1
SIUG Resources related to MS-OOXML
http://siug.ch/ms-ooxml/
Swedish Standards Institute declares Open XML vote void (31.08.2007)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/95270/
Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format
(5.09.2007)
http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2007-09-05.en.html
Forecast: ISO Will Announce on Tuesday that OOXML Approval has Failed
(3.09.2007)
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070903...
An Open Letter to ISO (7.09.2007)
http://blogs.freecode.no/isene/2007/09/07/an-open-letter-to-iso/
OpenISO.org
http://openiso.org/