Now there are only a few days until I jump on a plane and head South to Switzerland, Geneva for the ISO/IEC SC34 Ballot Resolution Group Meeting, amongst laymen known primarily as "The BRM meeting". I cannot get my head around if I am exited or worried about the outcome of the meeting ... thinking primarily about the enormous workload expecting us down there. We will have to work through about 1000 unique disposition of comments from ISO/IEC editor Rex - scattered over about 3500 comments in total. It's a daunting task indeed - not least for BRM convenor Alex Brown from BSI UK. Adding to this workload is the small addition, that we will be 120 delegates dealing with it. It truly is breath-taking and I cannot help but feel like a mountain-climber standing at the foot of Mount Everest waiting to start the journey upwards. I expect the days to be work in the BRM meeting during normal work hours and work in the evening at the hotel sifting through the results of the day preparing for the next.
I am also thinking quite a bit on what will actually take place in Geneva at the meetings. As I understand the ISO rules (and please note, I have been wrong before), after the BRM is done, the standard to approve is the original submission with the changes made in Geneva. In other words - if not a single disposition can be agreed upon, the standard stands as it did when it was submitted in Spring 2007. I really hope that the delegates opposing OOXML do not try to paralyze the BRM with a massive DOS-attack on the process. As Alex Brown points out, it is the responsibility of the Head of Delegations (HoD) that this does not happen, and if I look at what we have been informed by the Danish HoD, it is clear to me, that they actually have a lot of future credibility in standards work vested in this. If they are not able to perform in an ordily manner at the BRM, their influence in all the other work they are doing will be diminished. I hope this will keep the lid on most of the fanatic out-bursts.
I am also looking forward to meeting some of the people I met in Kyoto in December 2007. Of course it is always nice to talk to people you agree with, but I sometimes get a bit bored with the "echo-chamber"-feeling of spending too much time with people of your own opinion. So I am even more looking forward to conversations with the delegates (and, yes, even the people of Open Forum Europe, who I have been told will be cheering us along in the corridors of the meeting) who are a bit more on the negative side of DIS 29500. It will be interesting to see what they think.
OOh ... and on Saturday I will go see Dinosaurs!
Wanna join?
759c81bd-0bd3-4b14-935b-52fde255e8ca|0|.0|96d5b379-7e1d-4dac-a6ba-1e50db561b04