Archive for February, 2008
Andy Updegrove has the results in detail here, including a breakdown of the votes. Basically, there were too many proposed changes to be able to cover them in the BRM, so they tried a workaround, but the upshot is ... it's a mess. Oddly, despite the rules, Alex Brown, Updegrove reports, allowed non P countries to vote, but OOXML still couldn't get a majority of the delegations to back it at the BRM. Nor is it clear that allowing non P countries to vote is even legitimate. Now it's the 30-day voting period, but Updegrove asks, if they never could discuss all the issues, which is the purpose of a BRM, what's the basis for a vote? And with the vast majority either voting to abstain or even refusing to vote as a protest, I think one may conclude this proposal didn't belong on the fast track, and it isn't getting the kind of support you would have thought it might, given all the muscle that has gone into the push to get OOXML approved.
See full post at Groklaw.net
Updated March 1: You can find an interview by Sean Daly at Groklaw where I go into greater detail on what was happening in Geneva and why it matters. See also the links added at the end of this entry, most of which are by BRM delegatesA rather incredible week in Geneva has just ended, bringing to a close the Herculean task assumed by the over 100 delegates from 32 countries that attended the BRM. That challenge, of course, was how to productively resolve the more than 1,100 comments (after elimination of duplicates) registered by the 87 National Bodies that voted last summer with respect to a specification that itself exceeded 6,000 pages. ... Read the full post at the ConsortiumInfo blog
If you’ve been reading this site, you may be surprised to know that we haven’t ever officially “launched.” We just sort of came to be and started blogging on the AB 1668 process. As we look to extend the number of people involved in bytesfree.org, as well as the scope of what bytesfree.org hopes to accomplish, it became clear that bytesfree.org had to graduate to a real organization with some real infrastructure. And so it begins…
On Friday, February 8, 8pm at SCALE, there will be an Open Source Politics birds-of-a-feather session. If you intend to be at SCALE, and we hope you will be, please do drop by. We will discuss the upcoming June primaries in California (Feb. 5 is just the presidential primary) and the issues that matter to us: copyright reform, information rights, DRM, open formats, digital divide, open voting, etc.
One of the core values for bytesfree.org is that everyone deserves the right to access whatever information they legally possess. Another core value is that these rights, what we call “information rights”, rise to the level of basic human rights, on account of the prominence of the Internet and digital technologies. As we looked around at the organizations dedicated to these issues, 2 things stood out:
- they did not communicate those messages effectively, if at all, in our opinion. Or…
- they were incorporated as 501 (c)(3) nonprofits, which limited the amount of legislative and election lobbying they could perform
So on February 8, we will announce a few things. First will be an introduction to who is behind this web site, which will be Ilan Rabinovitch, a co-founder of SCALE, John Mark Walker, and 2 other names to be mentioned then. We will also give an update on our application for 501 (c)(4) status, which gives us more leeway in terms of political activities. After that, it will all be about how to get ready for June. We hope to see you there!
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