Microsoft has developed an XML based file format designed to replace the binary formats used by old versions of Microsoft Office. This new file format is called Office Open XML or OOXML and is currently going through a process to ratify it as an international standard backed by ISO. The designation for the standard is Draft International Standard 29500, or DIS29500. The fast track process the standard has followed has been very controversial, in the initial round of votes a large number of comments were raised. These comments will be brought to a Ballot Resolution Meeting in Geneva at the end of February 2008. Currently there is an overwhelming number of comments to resolve at a large meeting in a short time. Many comments are duplicates raised several times by different countries, many are quite trivial and could be addressed easily. Some are really interesting and worthy of discussion. The purpose of this website is to help the countries and the facilitators of the BRM to prepare by sorting and categorising and de-duplicating the comments so that they can focus on the issues of substance.
There are now 3522 proposed dispositions to the comments, but are they any good? It is a huge task for the national bodies to sort and evaluate these and prepare their thoughts on the significant issues in time for the BRM. We can help by tagging the dispositions to highlight which are suitable for the paper voting procedure, and which need to be discussed in more detail.
How to help now
Click the button below to be whisked away to a random location. Use the tabs to read the comment, any suggestion that the national body had, and importantly the proposed disposition. Have a think about it, then look at the buttons below in the “Tag and Go” section. Press the most appropriate and your tag will be recorded and you will go to another random location. If you have something more to say about a particular disposition or want a new tagging option then you can use the comments pane to discuss it.
I’m Feeling Lucky
We need to aim to process about 200 tags per day, if you can do five each day then we will get there.
We have reimported all the data with much better fidelity, however some dispositions are rather long (or perhaps contain some weird characters) and are not displaying at all at the moment. We are on the case and hope to get these ones fixed soon. Red text is stuff that has been removed, blue is new text being inserted.