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OOXML Vote and the CPI Corruption Index
Tapani Tarvainen writes "It turns out there's an interesting correlation between Transparency International's 'corruption perceptions index' and voting behavior in ISO's OOXML decision. Countries with a lower score (more corruption) on the 2006 CPI were more likely to vote in favor of OOXML, and those with a higher score were less likely. According to the analysis, 'This statistics supports with a P value of 0.07328 the hypothesis that the corrupted countries were more likely to vote for approval (one-tailed Fisher's Exact test). In other words, simplified a bit: the likelihood that there was no positive correlation between the corruption level and probability of an approval vote, that is, this is just a random effect, is about 7%.' Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality."
I've put up a little website with some initial thoughts, and I'd appreciate feedback from the slashdot community please.
This is one of the best stories I've seen on Slashdot in months. Actual facts always trump FUD and jumping to conclusions.
Most research in the social sciences considers the threshold for statistical significance below .05. Since this is above, few would have confidence that this result is not random chance. So, reporting this result, while informative if you are trained in statistics, is likely misleading to the average reader...
Welcome to the world of international organisations.
t m . Pity actually. It would have been quite fitting.
Those of us observing the ruthless buying of pro-whaling votes by Japan over the last decade have noticed this one long ago. In that case countries that do not even have a coastline or a single ship registered in their name apply for a membership in the International Whaling Commission with Japanese money and go ahead to vote with a yes.
Unfortunately the dead body of a standard is not sufficiently heavy and smelly so it will be difficult for GreenPeace to dump it on the Microsoft doorsteps http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4627178.s
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
that large countries can't dominate small countries. If China and India decided everything...
But small countries are easily dominated by money-wielding vested interests... don't you think? The 51% "Yes" votes actually translate to less than 20% of the population of the nations that participated. That's a gross aberration, and the ISO must take note of it.
BTW, even if India AND China supported a standard, they'd only hae 33% representation - many more nations would need to support to reach 67%.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Come on people, we've been over this already!
If you look at the scientific studies, correlation is so closely correlated with causation that it's safe to say that one causes the other.
Check the stats for yourself.
Although I don't agree with whaling, I feel I should at least point out that the IWC was a whaling industry organisation that was subverted into a conservation group. This happened as a group of big countries recruited a lot of the smaller countries (with again, no whaling interests of their own) to join the IWC and vote to ban whaling.
...
So this ruthless vote buying process is hardly without precedent
there is no way to fix capitalism. money can buy you influence. even here. if you have enough money that you can pay 40000ppl worldwide you can alos afford to pay a few more to subvert openiso.org if it ever becomes necessary. it will make it hardare but it will not make it impossible. most likely it will not become necessary since they just buy the governments and tell them to ignore openiso.org at all. see all the legislation that is in favor of corporations like microsoft and others that is going on in the EU, the US and everywhere... most political parties in power there are already in line with capitalist interests.
what would make such an approach useful is that in the process of finding sane standards the people involved will learn about the deficiencies of the capitalist regime. capitalist regime is corrupt per definition: it means that money can buy you what you want. which is plain corruption. the more money you have the more human labor and natural resources you can command...
greetings from vienna,
mond.
The idea of rich countries dominating reminds me of the UN Security Council.
The Security Council sort of acts like a world government, but in fact is the reason the UN isn't a world government. The permanent membership of the council consists, more or less, of countries with enough military or economic clout to tell the UN to go to hell. It is a recognition of the fundamental anarchy of international relations: no legal restrain can be forced upon these countries, therefore they have veto power over anything the UNSC decides.
The same argument goes for giving rich countries more clout. If the US says to hell with an ISO stndard, we'll make a standard in ANSI instead, and ISO standard is considerably less useful.
If you wanted to make the system more effective (as opposed to pragmatically accepting the status quo), you should look at the purpose of standards: to increase economic efficiency. In any economic interchange involving a product or service governed by a standard, an effective standard offers customers a wider array of vendors and vendors a broader spectrum of customers. Where a vendor is dominant, as in Microsoft, they can enforce a proprietary "de facto" standard, but this doesn't serve the purpose of a real standard.
It therefore would make sense to scale each country's vote by the number of entities doing business in the area governed by the standard. In fact we should get rid of countries altogether as voting entities; any entity should be able to vote provided that they show (a) they do business related to the standard, (b) they pay a modest entry fee and (c) they are independent of any other voting entity.
The only problem with this is that it unrealistically weights the process towards small entities. So, perhaps anybody should be able to buy as many votes as they like, but each marginal vote costs exponentially more than the last. That way the folks working on, say, abiword could buy a single vote for a couple thosuand dollars, whereas Microsoft might by ten or twenty votes but spend millions of dollars for the privilege. Depending on how you scaled each marginal vote cost, you could weight the system towards diversity or towards economic clout as much as you wanted.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.