Do you love Microsoft?

Bob Sutor (IBM) blogged on 6 August 2007 that “I predict we will see will be widespread re-evaluation of national standards body membership and voting rules.” In particular, he thought, that the process should be more open. Commenting on this on 11 August 2007, Alex Brown blogged that “openness, like choice, is one of the most over-sold concepts of our age”.

The BSI (British Standards Institute) is the “National Body” which decides how the UK should vote on ISO/IEC standards and represents the UK at ISO/IEC and JTC1 meetings. The BSI process is open in that anyone who looks technical qualified can participate in the bottom committee (which does most of the detailed work), but it is otherwise opaque. The membership of the committees is confidential, and their proceedings are confidential. But Alex saw “absolutely no evidence” that the process had been abused, and implied that the BSI process was of high quality.

From what I saw of it (as a member of the bottom committee and an observer at some discussions of the advisory committee above), I agree with that judgment. The MS and IBM members both behaved courteously and reasonably and neither made any obvious attempt to pack the committee. The BSI rules require that it proceed by “consensus”. That is a somewhat ambiguous term and is not the same as “unanimity”. It requires those who are obviously in a small minority to back down and not press their views beyond a certain point. I certainly watched that happening on a number of issues.

But I still disagree fundamentally with Alex. It may be true that confidential proceedings in committees whose membership is not known can, on occasion, give excellent results. It is certainly true that such proceedings are easier for the participants, who are not exposed to lobbying or abuse. But standard-setting needs to be conducted in the open, just as courts need to conduct their business in the open. Exactly the same principles apply. I would favour opening all meetings to press and public and keeping reasonably full minutes which were published on the internet. Justice needs to be seen to be done.

Oddly enough, I suspect that Alex is not completely unsympathetic to this view. He was the convenor (a kind of chairman) of the bottom BSI committee, so was presumably responsible for the decision to display its technical work in a Wiki on the internet. Although the public could not see who was responsible for which entries, the Wiki did have the effect of placing the key technical work into the public domain. In practice, I think that will make it exceedingly difficult for the BSI to vote anything but “No with comments”. It would look ridiculous if it abstained or voted “yes”, or even voted No with only trivial comments, when everyone can see that its technical committee has come up with large numbers of significant comments.

However, we will have to wait and see!