OpenISO.org Review of OOXML

If ISO/IEC JTC1 decides to go forward with publication of their planned standard, OpenISO.org intends to review this revised specification from the perspective of OpenISO.org's criteria.

This work will commence soon after the revised standard document is made publicly available.

Long-term vision for OpenISO.org

• Decisions between conflicting opinions or interests should always be made in a fact-oriented manner based on sound engineering and openness principles.
• Participation in OpenISO.org work should be open to everyone who is willing and able to work according to a reasonable set of procedural guidelines. Draft OpenISO.org Core Guidelines.
• In addition to facilitating a conversation among experts (by means of which standards are developed and evaluated, etc), OpenISO.org should also solicit, actively consider, and respond to feedback from the general public.
• OpenISO.org will be active both in the area of developing technical specifications which are suitable as standards and in the area of reviewing documents published by other organizations for compliance with principles of good engineering, openness and economic fairness.
• All work documents of OpenISO.org will be made freely available to everyone via the internet, free of charge.
• Currently OpenISO.org is simply a personal initiative with the commitment that at the very least, a good and appropriate problem report regarding the OOXML specification will be produced. However, a serious attempt is being made to establish a sustainable business model for OpenISO.org, this could be an industry consortium composed of companies which are interested in ensuring that fact-oriented review of standardization proposals is done in a credible manner, or alternatively a start-up business of some kind might be established for which it makes sense as part of its marketing plan to operate OpenISO.org.
• Ideally in the log run, OpenISO.org should produce evaluations at least for all significant information technology standards and standardization proposals. For example, here is a Draft OpenISO.org evaluation of the TELNET protocol.

If you're interested in participating, please subscribe to the discuss@OpenISO.org discussion mailing list

OpenISO.org will focus initially on collecting and reviewing the criticism of MS-OOXML as well as on conducting a survey of the most important standards for communicating and conducting business transactions over the internet.