Promoting ODF (OpenDocument Format),OOXML won't be accepted in South America.
Over the past month, the team at OpenMalaysiaBlog was really happy to showcase the good work Malaysians have done in government agencies and state governments in adopting OpenOffice.org in their offices. Some were driven from MAMPU's direction, but most were self initiatives, some even starting way back in 2003.
I personally, have been deliberately avoiding OOXML news because basically, I was sick and tired of it; where the latest ridiculous situation is where the same people who voted for the standard, get to vote against the appeal of the decision. Surely it shouldn't be an immediate voting procedure (ala BRM), but more of a consensus gathering effort? What happened to the process of working out the sustained objections as espoused by ISO procedures? As far as I know, since the Contradiction documents prepared by all the NBs back in Feb07, there has been no effort by ISO to work that out. Looking at the ISO process, its clear its broken and when there are forces determined to push it through, it will push it through.
Looks as though that this process has pissed off more people though. Entire countries. Continents even. In the International Congress of Society and Electronic Government (CONSEGI) 2008; Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay signed a joint declaration against the latest decision by ISO to ignore the appeals.
The event is far more than these few countries criticising ISO. It has a far greater impact on the FOSS world in southern countries, and as described by a participant, "the event in Brasilia was the Mecca of free software in the world". Check out the long list of speakers from relevant representatives from government agencies, international speakers and institutions. This blog better describes the discussions:
Gathered in the framework of South-South Coalition Dynamics, which occurred during the first day of CONSEGI, representatives of South Africa, Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cape Verde, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, India, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe , Uruguay and Venezuela discussed ways and strategies to spread the use and development of open source software and open source, e-government programs and digital inclusion.
So even though Microsoft may have gotten the ISO certification it desperately needed, the damage done has been considerable. The past two years brought together the international community, raised more awareness to real open standards than before, and unfortunately for them, pinpointed them as a common "enemy." It looks like countries south of the equator have clearly indicated that OOXML will NOT be recognised as any form of government interoperability format.
And the backlash has only just begun ...
yk.
CONSEGI 2008 DECLARATION
We, the undersigned representatives of state IT organisations from Brazil, South Africa, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Paraguay, note with disappointment the press release from ISO/IEC/JTC-1 of 20 August regarding the appeals registered by the national bodies of Brazil, South Africa, India and Venezuela. Our national bodies, together with India, had independently raised a number of serious concerns about the process surrounding the fast track approval of DIS29500. That those concerns were not properly addressed in the form of a conciliation panel reflects poorly on the integrity of these international standards development institutions.
Whereas we do not intend to waste any more resources on lobbying our national bodies to pursue the appeals further, we feel it is important to make the following points clear:
1.The bending of the rules to facilitate the fast track processing of DIS29500 remains a significant concern to us. That the ISO TMB did not deem it necessary to properly explore the substance of the appeals must, of necessity, put confidence in those institutions ability to meet our national requirements into question.
2.The overlap of subject matter with the existing ISO/IEC26300 (Open Document Format) standard remains an area of concern. Many of our countries have made substantial commitments to the use of ISO/IEC26300, not least because it was published as an ISO standard in 2006.
3.The large scale adoption of a standard for office document formats is a long and expensive exercise, with multi-year projects being undertaken in each of our countries. Many of us have dedicated significant time and resources to this effort. For example, in Brazil, the process of translation of ISO/IEC26300 into Portuguese has taken over a year.
The issues which emerged over the past year have placed all of us at a difficult crossroads. Given the organisation's inability to follow its own rules we are no longer confident that ISO/IEC will be capable of transforming itself into the open and vendor-neutral standards setting organisation which is such an urgent requirement. What is now clear is that we will have to, albeit reluctantly, re-evaluate our assessment of ISO/IEC, particularly in its relevance to our various national government interoperability frameworks. Whereas in the past it has been assumed that an ISO/IEC standard should automatically be considered for use within government, clearly this position no longer stands.
- Aslam Raffee (South Africa)
Chairman, Government IT Officer's Council Working Group on Open Standards Open Source Software- Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni (Brazil)
Presidente,Office of Federal Data Processing- Carlos Eloy Figueira (Venezuela)
President, National Center of Information Technologies- Eduardo Alvear Simba (Ecuador)
Director of Software Libre, Presidency of the Republic- Tomas Ariel Duarte C. (Paraguay)
Director of Information Technology, Presidency of the Republic- Miriam Valdés Abreu (Cuba)
Director of Analysis, Office for Computerisation.
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