[ODFPlugtest] Chatham House Rule

[Doug Mahugh]

I'd like to hear some clarification regarding the purpose and rules of the ODF plugfests.  Based on the many email threads and phone conversations that have gone into planning these events, I thought we had agreed to conduct ourselves in accordance with the Chatham House Rule, which states that "... participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed."

Some of you may recall that I was opposed to that rule, because I felt that we should all be free to speak about the details of what took place at these plugfests.  Michiel Leenaars and Rob Weir were the people I recall being most vocal in support of the Chatham House Rule, and they argued that it was needed to protect smaller implementers from being publicly criticized by larger implementers.

But in the two weeks since the Orvieto plugfest, I have seen public comments from other participants that clearly violate the Chatham House Rule.  For example:

"This is a unique workshop where commercial vendors, governments and open source developers discuss updates to their implementations of ODF. For example, we showed Microsoft that it could improve how it stores illustrations and graphics in ODF", commented Michiel Leenaars, director of the Dutch Internet Society and one of the organisers of the plugfest.  http://www.osor.eu/news/european-governments-help-increase-odf-interoperability

"I showed an interoperability issue with right-to-left languages. Several bugs were found in OpenOffice.org and MSOffice ... MS said several times that for optimum interoperability they choose a solution that works better with OOo and not what the specification says it should do." - Thomas Zander http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/11/19/two-conferences-about-odf/ (Re-tweeted by Rob Weir: http://twitter.com/rcweir/status/5860051161)

I have two concerns with these statements. One is that they violate the rules we agreed to follow. The other is that they are not accurate statements.

In the case of Michiel's quote, I think he may be confusing a discussion at the DII Brussels workshop or a discussion at my OOoCon session with conversations at the plugfest.  In any event, Michiel's repeated urging for Microsoft to support SVG gradients, which were not supported by any ODF implementation prior to May of this year, could just as accurately be applied to OpenOffice.org, Symphony, or many other implementations. Why is Microsoft singled out in this way? And why has Michiel not followed the Chatham House prohibition on stating the identity or affiliation of speakers and participants?

In the case of Thomas's blog post, I'm not aware of any bug in Office's approach to RTL documents that has been identified (certainly none was identified at the plugfest itself), and there is nothing in the ODF standard that says an implementation "should" use SVG for gradients, so that statement is false.  Why has Thomas not followed the Chatham House Rule? And why is Rob Weir directing additional public attention to this violation of the Chatham House Rule, which he felt so strongly was needed for these events?

If these plugfests are actually intended as an opportunity to beat up on a particular vendor (Microsoft, in this case) then that needs to be made more clear up front, and the official statement of purpose of the plug fest needs to reflect that.  On the other hand, if we are indeed working together to try to improve ODF interoperability, and using the protection of the Chatham House rule to assure a safe environment for such work, then I would expect to see other plugfest attendees condemn the kinds of statements that Michiel and Thomas are making publicly, rather than drawing additional attention to them through Twitter and other means.

Can somebody please clarify for me what's going on?

Thanks,
Doug

Doug Mahugh    |    Lead Standards Professional   |   Office Interoperability    |   425-707-1182   |   blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh<http://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh>

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