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You should expound your vitriol a bit earlier in the proicess :

Take a look at the board :
http://www.incits.org/ebmem.htm

Here's some reporting on the last vote
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/07/ansi-denie s-oox.html

My canonical reference for these things is Andy Updegrove's blog (http://consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/).

I can't give you a "who voted how" but I can tell you who can vote:
http://v1.incits.org/v1mem.htm

Apart from a few biggies like IBM or Sun, most of them you never ever heard of.
The interesting part what is RH doing there except what MS does, but within the opposite camp? E.g. being there purely to thwart MS' doings.

It's especially interesting how Microsoft is trying to hack the standards process. If you read this linked comment you'll see the list of new members, their relationships to Microsoft, and a long and interesting essay by Marbux about why this shouldn't be happening.

But it is.

The good news is that it appears money can fix this - short money for most (the cost of a couple copies of Microsoft Office). If you have any discretionary budgetary authority and would be adversely affected by OOXML being an ANSI standard, please go here, read about the membership process (it appears to cost $800 to be on the technical committees) and fill out the membership form. If you're an academic institution you can get on the technical committees and have an advisory role for $2000.

Yes, the process is broken, but it appears this can be stopped pretty quickly. They're hacking, all we can do is hack back.

It would be great if a hundred universities and a couple hundred Slashdotters' businesses were able to get on the committee by the end of the week. It would reverse the trend, by quite a margin. By all means, try to get the process fixed in parallel, but any such efforts there will likely come in too late.

It's especially interesting how Microsoft is trying to hack the standards process. If you read this linked comment you'll see the list of new members, their relationships to Microsoft, and a long and interesting essay by Marbux about why this shouldn't be happening.

But it is.

The good news is that it appears money can fix this - short money for most (the cost of a couple copies of Microsoft Office). If you have any discretionary budgetary authority and would be adversely affected by OOXML being an ANSI standard, please go here, read about the membership process (it appears to cost $800 to be on the technical committees) and fill out the membership form. If you're an academic institution you can get on the technical committees and have an advisory role for $2000.

Yes, the process is broken, but it appears this can be stopped pretty quickly. They're hacking, all we can do is hack back.

It would be great if a hundred universities and a couple hundred Slashdotters' businesses were able to get on the committee by the end of the week. It would reverse the trend, by quite a margin. By all means, try to get the process fixed in parallel, but any such efforts there will likely come in too late.

" Guys: I am a member of the group that Microsoft joined"

Nice, can you explain, since you don't accept members whith problems with antitrust laws, why was Microsoft accepted?

Also, don't your group make decisions based on consensus, instead o majority? How do you think Microsoft (that assumed plublicaly to be against ODF) won't disturb the acceptance process?

If the 'real world' is anything like the place I work. Standards are a dream, that will never come to be, because everyone likes do do things "their way".

In the hardware world, this doen't get you very far. There are a great many standards out there that are followed as well as any standard ever is. There are also a significant number of software standards, especially for languages.

The big computer-related industry standards body in America is INCITS, which has technical committees which define many international standards (such as RFID, SCSI, Fibre Channel, and ATA), as well as the American TAGs for international commitees (such as C, C++, Pascal, Fortran and COBOL). They also have standards bodies that I'm not very familiar with for areas like encryption, databases, and graphics and image processing. The ANSI and ISO/IEC groups also define many standards (INCITS is effectively the computer technology arm of ANSI these days).

There are a great many standards available for a great many things, and many governments already have requirements in this area. This has little to do with open source, and it seems like the report just wants to identify this as a best practice. No harm in that, I guess, but hardly newsworthy.

I'm not sure, but I think your thinking of the switch fabrics that are chip sets in routers and switches that, I believe, direct traffic. I couldn't find a really good description of them, but here's a standard release that quickly skims over the technology: INCITS