[MPEG-OTSPEC] Proposal to discontinue the AdHoc Group

[David Singer]

> On 21Sep, 2020, at 1:16 , Adam Twardoch (Lists) <list.adam at twardoch.com> wrote:
> 
> 6. I never really understood the ISO OFF process, hovewer. In fact, up until recently I didn’t follow OFF much at all. But with OFF, I think the “host–guest” delineation is muddled. It seems that the process of developing the OFF standard is trying to both eat the cake and keep it. 
> 
> On one hand, it tries to mirror whatever goes on in OpenType (but not TrueType), so it “follows”. On the other hand, it occasionally tries to put forward some changes in its own, so it tries to “lead”. 
> 
> In the end, it had the appearance that it’s not clear whether ISO is really decisive about the OFF standard or it isn’t. But I’ve never worked on any other ISO standards, so I really don’t know what is the “ISO way”.

Maybe it’s worth explaining how ISO standards come to be issued.

ISO is an organization of national standards organizations, formally. It’s divided into committees; one of them is the huge joint technical committee with IEC, ISO/IEC JTC1, which handles all IT-related standardization. It’s divided into sub-committees, that operate roughly independently of each other.

SC29 is formally responsible for multimedia, and is divided internally into multiple working groups. Until very recently, there were only two: JPEG and MPEG (WG1 and WG11). MPEG was divided into sub-WGs (video, audio, systems, etc.) and recently SC29 re-organized such that those sub-WGs are now WGs. The systems group, that handles the font format, is WG3.

There are two important aspects of ISO (that we can’t change at our level): to attend meetings you need to be a formal member of a national delegation; and proposals for new work items (new standards), and voting on formal progression of standards, are all done by national delegations. So, for example, the first formal step of a new standard is issuance of a Committee Draft (CD) and national bodies comment on that, and indicate whether they approve or disapprove; then DIS, comment again, and then finally FDIS, yes/no. Comments are formally processed at meetings and responses formed, and the editors take the comments and agreed responses as their instructions for preparing the next step. 

For many committees, that’s it. MPEG is unusual (I think): it also runs these open ad-hoc groups that anyone can join, to get expert input and views from the larger community. MPEG is also unusual that it often makes CDs publicly visible, enabling public comment. DIS is generally not, alas, nor FDIS. In practice, this means that there is a lot of opportunity for expert involvement outside the national delegations. 

For the US at least, however, joining the national delegation is neither hard nor expensive; I think the mirror committee to SC29, L3, costs a few thousand per year per company (I’d have to check). This varies a lot by nation, of course.

(Personally, I could wish that there was significantly more expert and NB involvement in the font work in SC29.)

Dave Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple

singer at apple.com