94 OOXML: What happened in Romania

Posted: Sep 27, 2007, under Romania, Standards. Updated: Oct 1, 2007. Add a comment!

This article presents my research regarding what went down in Romania as part of the process that allowed national standard organizations to express their position on the proposed ISO/IEC DIS 29500 specification, known as OOXML.

1. Recommended reading

If you don’t know what the OOXML issue is about and if you can read Romanian, I recommend you to go over my detailed presentation first. If you don’t know Romanian, there’s a rather large compilation of reading material at Groklaw.

Please be advised that without at least basic background into the matter you won’t be able to put this article into perspective.

2. Disclaimer

I’m an individual, currently freelancing, a Romanian citizen, not affiliated with any company, organization or public institution. I’m doing this to satisfy my curiosity and to uncover things we can all learn from. I do not have an agenda or ulterior motive.

I’ve been researching what went down in Romania with the occasion of the OOXML vote for the last couple of months. Based on the reports from other countries, it’s fair to say I was expecting a certain amount of conspiration. However, I tried hard to look at facts alone and leave any personal bias aside.

3. The facts

3.1. The Romanian standard body

The Romanian standard organization called to deal with the OOXML specification is ASRO (Standardization Association of Romania). ASRO is a member of CEN, CENELEC, ISO/IEC and ETSI.

ASRO is a Romanian association not affiliated to government or politics. Its activity is governed by the Romanian laws regarding all associations, in general, and laws regarding standardization, in particular.

Romania has O status (Observer) within ISO.

3.2. The technical committee

The story begins in March, when Technical Committee 210 (CT210), a workgroup within ASRO, was assigned to work on OOXML.

CT210 is composed of the following:

  • A technical expert assigned from ASRO (Teodor Stătescu). He is basically the ASRO representative. He does not vote on the standards. One of his duties seem to be to act as liaison between the committee members and ASRO. My data suggests that he is the one who passed on information regarding the finer points of procedure from ASRO to the committee. It is unclear how useful his technical expertise (or its nature) was in regard to OOXML.
  • 12 members, who can discuss the standards and can express their vote. These are technically juridical personas, but act through an individual designated as representative. These are the members, in no particular order:

Important fact: anybody can join an ASRO technical comittee. They have to be delegated as the representative of a juridical persona (company, association, institution and so on) and pay a yearly fee of 200 RON (about 75 USD or 60 EUR) for every comittee it joins. (In case you’re wondering, no, Romania is not that poor that this sum would be considered much by any Romanian business.)

CT210’s official name and designation was “Character sets and codifications”. In this area, most if not all of the above 12 members have contributed useful work to some degree in the past. The suspicion of ballot stuffing is therefore nullified.

There are one or two members whose efforts in regard to OOXML have seemed out of place with their former activity and therefore can be speculated that they took advantage of their position in order to vote. But none of the ones I talked to have named them and there’s no hard proof to support this. Therefore there’s no evidence of foul play in this respect.

The work of CT210 up to the OOXML moment usually consisted of issues such as the standardization of the Romanian keyboard, and generally things that have to do with “character sets and codification”, as their designation implies.

So, why was OOXML assigned to this committee? The answer is simple: CT210 was officially the equivalent of three ISO subcommittees: SC 02 (coded character sets), SC 34 (document description and processing languages) and SC 35 (user interfaces), as well as one CEN committee (TC 304 - Information and Communication Technologies - European Localization Requirements). I remind you that OOXML was assigned by ISO to SC 34.

There is no evidence that assigning OOXML to CT210 was part of a ploy to get OOXML approved more easily. The association between CT210 and the aforementioned ISO/IEC/CEN committees was in place since June 2006. It’s just that CT210 never had to deal with problems outside of the range usually assigned to SC 02. Tehnically they were the equivalent of up to four ISO/CEN subcommittees; but for practical purposes, they were not.

3.3. The research process

Designation nonwhitstanding, fact is that most members of CT210 were poorly prepared to deal with OOXML. We can reasonably expect that the IBM and Microsoft representatives were knowledgeable of the subject. The rest, however, were used to dealing with a completely different set of technical problems, and have joined the committee in the past with the express purpose of working on that kind of problems.

It is my personal impression that ASRO does not seem to have a lot of resources, or it does not use them very effectively, if it has them. You must understand that the work in comittees such as CT210 is done as a voluntary effort. People contribute only to certain topics that interest them. For CT210, these topics are “coding and character sets”, period. OOXML came out of nowhere and caught most of them almost completely unprepared.

Research was left to each member’s to do on his own. ASRO did not offer tehnical advice or offered to bring in experts of any kind. This, however, was not out of the ordinary; it was not done with OOXML because it was never done. CT210 members always deal with technical issues on their own.

It is fair to say that almost none of the members (perhaps with the exception of Microsoft and IBM representatives) have read the OOXML specification. A few of them openly admitted to “browsing” it briefly and eventually giving up any attempt to actually read and understand it.

I do not mean to put down the representatives’ overall technical skills. However, OOXML was a specialized topic and it carried the burden of a minimal amount of research and some required reading. They did not take the necessary steps to become reasonably well informed on this topic.

Actually, it is hard to determine on what kind of information did the members base their vote on. We can only speculate that they used the Internet or whatever means at their disposal. Not to excuse them, but I’d like to point out that looking up data on the Internet and disseminating “good” information from “bad” is not always as easy as it seems.

Please remember that many of the more vocal information opposing OOXML all over the world only surfaced after the vote took place. Before July one would have to work harder to uncover facts. It is unclear how good the CT210 members even are at using the Internet to search for information. Of the ones that did do so, several admitted being put off at the time by what struck them as an unordinate amount of too much fanatism and too little reasonable information on the subject. May this be a warning for any kind of hot-head out there; you risk harming your own cause in the end.

One last chance at changing this situation seems to have been unadvertently wasted by the IBM representatives at the voting session. They assumed that all the other representatives have “done their homework” and launched directly into strong criticism over OOXML, taking the Microsoft representatives head on. Both the IBM and the Microsoft teams contained one evangelist in addition to the representative who would actually express the vote. The clash of these evangelists served to further put off the rest of the members. Again, the debate was seen as too much on the side of fanatism and too little on the side of constructive criticism. The other members got nothing useful and voted according to whatever idea they had managed to form on OOXML on their own.

3.4. The vote

The voting session was described as “very lively”. I imagine it was, compared to the usual much less passionate sessions enjoyed by the CT210 in their regular work in the past.

IBM voted “no” (without comments). MCTI (The Romanian Ministry for Communications and IT) abstained. The rest of the members voted “yes” (again, without comments).

It must be noted that several members had their misgivings about voting “yes” and that the general situation was in no way as clear-cut as the above results may make it appear. They expressed doubts and objections to the OOXML specification as it stood at that time. However, all those who objected apparently chose to trust the Microsoft representative, who told them that these issues would eventually be adressed by Microsoft anyway by the ballot resolution meeting.

It is also crucial to note that a vote was something new for CT210. They don’t seem to have had the occasion to work on an ISO standard before. Their usual procedure was quite constructive: they worked on a specification until they reached a form that all of them more or less agreed upon.

Therefore, they needed to be told how the voting should be organized. Teodor Stătescu, as ASRO representative, reportedly told the members that there were three possible outcomes that ASRO could pass on to ISO: yes, no or abstain. He also told them that in case of an outcome of “no”, ASRO would have to offer some comments as well.

The president of the committee (Dan Matei, the CIMEC representative) did not vote, but had been granted power to decide the outcome in case of an indecisive first ballot. Ironically, as he later admitted publicly, Dan Matei was in no position to make such a decision, having not studied the issue properly and having only a vague idea of the pro’s and con’s. Like most other members of the committee, in fact.

It is unclear whether Teodor Stătescu was conveying the information regarding the procedure from ASRO, or where he got the idea of organizing the vote in this manner in the first place. At no point before the vote were the members told of the five possible kinds of positions available to ASRO (yes, yes with comments, no with comments, no, abstain) and the meaning they would carry with ISO. Some of them admitted, in retrospective, having later found out more about the vote significance and more about OOXML, that they would perhaps have voted differently. However, remember that there is a lot of speculation involved in estimating how up to 12 different people and the entities they represented approached this issue.

In the end, the vote was transmitted to ISO as a simple “yes”, with no comments. It is unclear whether, had the members expressed any comments officially, they would have been passed on and whether Romania’s vote would have become “yes with comments”.

3.5. The aftermath and public backlash

At some point after the vote, Dan Matei (I remind you, CIMEC representative and acting president of CT210) felt the duty to mention the vote result on a Romanian public discussion forum (TIC-Lobby). It appears to have been entirely a personal initiative. This message has spawned a heated discussion thread that continued months later.

Dan Matei caught a lot of flack for this initiative. At least until the situation was clarified more, the thread he debuted was seen as an outlet for expressing everything that people thought was wrong with OOXML, in the context of other deep seeded issues specific to Romania. However, he said he does not regret it as much as one would think, since his express purpose was getting things out in the open and avoiding perhaps even more extreme reactions, should the result had been kept covered any more.

Several other good things came of this. It made people aware of the OOXML issue; it made them offer more information and discuss things; it made them go out and look up data on OOXML for themselves and form opinions. If there’s more awareness today among the IT people in Romania in regard to OOXML, a role was certainly played by that discussion thread.

3.6. The issue of public consultation

Among the protests following the ASRO handling of the OOXML issue, one question recurred. Why wasn’t there any kind of public consultation? Why wasn’t the issue publicized more?

The answer is simple. Because there never is. I’m sad to say that Romanian institutions still have a long way to go towards understanding that openness is not just a means for keeping them in check (and implying that they’re doing something wrong), but also a great way of allowing people to contribute, to help.

ASRO makes no exception. True, they publish their work assignments on their site, but they do so as an obligation. They don’t seem to understand the possible benefits that proper transparency could bring.

Also, Cristian Secară (Magic Fox Media representative in CT210 and long time contributor to the standardization of the Romanian keyboard), forwarded to the same public forum (TIC-Lobby), as early as May, a message from Teodor Stătescu sent to CT210 members, which informed them of the fact that ECMA had adopted the ECMA 376 standard, had sent it to ISO as ISO/IEC 29500 and that it had reached ASRO as such and would undergo research. Cristian Secară invited whoever was interested to contact Teodor Stătescu and get involved if they wished to do so.

Nobody did get involved. Neither an invitation on an IT forum, nor ASRO’s publication of its work agenda on its site attracted any interest.

It can be argued that ASRO would have been better served had they made a bigger effort to draw attention to this issue. Since, in retrospective, there seems to have been an acute lack of technical expertise involved in researching OOXML, a public call may well have drawn more informed parties to join the work. But this issue held nothing special for ASRO. It was one of many standards they processed. It was business as usual.

4. So, what happened in Romania?

There was nothing evil in Romania in regard to OOXML. There was no conspiracy.

The “yes” vote from Romania was a combination of: poor organization from the part of ASRO; making people without the necessary skills or information vote on something they knew nothing about; misunderstanding of the ISO voting procedure; acute lack of interest from the Romanians at large. Therefore the vote passed the way it did as a sort of default.

It can be speculated that Microsoft’s propaganda may have had a role to play in this outcome. If it was so, it was one of the few countries where it had so incredibly little resistance to overcome. There’s no evidence that Microsoft Romania did anything to actively influence the vote of any member of Technical Committee 210. They didn’t have to.

5. What is the lesson in all this?

Obviously, this state of facts is pathetic. What went wrong?

ASRO carries its part of responsability. Not for doing anything to influence the vote on OOXML one way or another, but for being very poorly organized. If the OOXML process says anything about the way ASRO usually works, it is a sad sight.

ASRO also needs to understand that being actively open has the potential of bringing in resources and contributions that may greatly enhance the quality of its work. And a big part of this is how you’re perceived by the public at large. When ASRO representatives refuse to talk, when they ignore your emails, when you have to hunt them down, when ASRO’s main email address is out of comission — all this can put a damper on anybody’s enthusiasm and makes ASRO look like a bureaucratic, antiquated institution that shuns initiative and dialogue.

Another part of the responsability belongs to the members of Technical Committee 210. It can be argued that, under the circumstances, they should not have taken upon themselves to deal with OOXML. If they were not seriously interested, enough to do a thorough job, they should have abstained from voting, or voice their concern with ASRO (some did), or ask for help from ASRO or the public at large. Ideally, ASRO itself should have recognized the lack of expertise and not attempt to burden them with this subject in the first place. Perhaps a reasonable response would have been to tell ISO that Romania abstains since it cannot make a proper, informed decision. In any case, it was not upright of the CT210 members to just “go with the flow” and ultimately approve of a specification they knew nothing about and may well be proved sub-par after all.

The rest of the responsability is carried by every Romanian who considers himself or herself interested in the issue of OOXML (myself included). There was no effort to hide things. ASRO did its business in the open; granted, they did so poorly and digging for info on the ASRO website is not easy (I won’t even get into the issue of the quality of the website itself). However, the fact remains that anybody truly interested in the outcome of the OOXML vote could have gotten involved a long time ago.

With minimal, concerted effort, the result may have been different. One can speculate all they wish about what Microsoft Romania, corrupt individuals or interested companies might have done to counter an anti-OOXML movement in Romania. But there was no such movement and we cannot brood over “what if”.

It can be argued that Romania is a poor, corrupt country and that Romanian businesses and individuals alike have to work hard to make ends meet. Chasing principles and abstracts under such conditions is hard to do.

Whether we have learned anything from this entire affair remains to be seen. The OOXML issue is not over yet. Any Romanian is free to visit the ASRO website, get in touch with them, join CT210 and see what can still be done about OOXML.

There are a number of online forums where Romanians are welcome to discuss things and get organized: TIC-Lobby, OOXML Talk Ro.

The specification will be discussed once again in February 2008 in Geneva by ISO, at a ballot resolution meeting. The national standard bodies will be given a second chance to change their vote and take into consideration how Microsoft has acted in respect to the comments that were expressed by the entire world.

It is said that suficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. There seems to be another force able to produce equally malicious results: acute lack of interest into one’s own fate. Some say that we, Romanians, have a special knack for this latter one.

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