Open Malaysia

[Update 4 December 2006: Image with SIRM logo removed.]

I remember meeting Yoon Kit for the first time at the 21 April 2006 meeting of the SIRIM TC4 (Technical Committee on E-Commerce) when the vote by the committee members was unanimously YES to approve the then ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 26300, i.e. the OpenDocument Format (ODF), and in turn for Malaysia to vote YES to ISO for it to become an ISO/IEC international standard. Since then, Yoon Kit became a fellow blogger here!

Today, Yoon Kit and I, together with another fellow blogger here, Ditesh, each of us representing different organizations, were part of another historic SIRIM TC4 meeting, because the meeting now unanimously voted YES to proceed with the "project" for ODF (now ISO/IEC 26300) to be made a Malaysian Standard (acronym "MS").

The project now will proceed to the next step of approval from the higher-level committee in SIRIM that TC4 is under, i.e. Industry Standards Committee Group "G" (or ISC G), after which there is a public comment period from September to October 2006. ISC G will look at any comments after that and raise it to the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation for sign-off  to become an MS. So,  I expect ODF to become MS 26300 by year-end 2006.

As the proposer of this project, I led the part of today's TC4 meeting agenda by saying that the previous TC4 meeting had already discussed benefits of ODF, re-stated the TC4 meeting's unanimous YES vote for the ISO balloting in that Apr 21 meeting, emphasized the ISO/IEC 26300 real international standard being implemented in real products with real users and real supporters from organizations around the world and stated the benefits of making it MS. I said these benefits include:

• national sovereignty
• the Malaysian government is very comfortable with ISO standards, so SIRIM has many times before adopted ISO standards as MS
• enable government bodies to cite the usage of an MS for the national document exchange format (instead of de facto standards)
• makes document exchange using ODF part of the national ICT agenda

I motioned for ISO/IEC 26300 to become MS.

The representative from the other "MS" raised a concern that ISO/IEC 26300 is not officially published yet, so we should wait. But the SIRIM Secretariat person quickly answered that there are no technical changes from the original ISO document, any changes will only be editorial and the official publication usually happens in about 2 months after ISO approval. I only had to re-emphasize what the SIRIM Secretariat person said and added that the published document, called Second Edition will actually be without substantive changes, and that the standard itself is the same as previously reviewed by TC4.

So I motioned again that TC4 approves it for the next steps of ISC G to approve it, then go for public comment in September to October 2006, by which time ISO/IEC 26300 will already be officially published. Yoon Kit gave his voice of support. So did the representative from MAMPU, this time sounding succint but clear and explicit about MAMPU's further actions to support ODF in the Malaysian Public Sector.

The representative from the other "MS" stood down. When will they realize that delay tactics don't work? Or Bob Sutor would say, "...the “slow it down” strategy has been a dismal failure."