Enterprisey thoughts – John Gøtze
Openization
Netherlands Picks ODF
Sep 17th
(Updated 20 September)Â
Just heard this news from the Netherlands: On behalf of the Dutch government, Frank Heemskerk, Minister State Secretary of Economic Affairs, announced today that ODF will be the standard for reading, publishing and the exchange of information for all governmental organisations. The deadline is January 2009. Heemskerk’s announcement is just one of several initiatives about the use of open standards and open source software in Dutch government.
Dutch announcement: Ministerie van Economische Zaken – Verplicht gebruik open standaarden bij overheid
More in Dutch: The Action Plan, About Action Plan, Background article
Actually, I don’t speak Dutch (and for those who think Danes speak Dutch: No, we speak Danish!), but it’s close enough in writing that I almost can make sense of it. So big discaimer on the accuracy of the information above. See comments to this post.
I’m not sure what the exact difference between a minister and a state secretary in the Netherlands is, but assume both represent the sitting government.
I’m also not sure what they mean by an Action Plan, and what legal status such plan has.
OOXML has not achieved the required number of votes for approval
Sep 4th
Moments ago, ISO issues a press release: Vote closes on draft ISO/IEC DIS 29500 standard:
A ballot on whether to publish the draft standard ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML file formats, as an International Standard by ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) has not achieved the required number of votes for approval.
The five-month ballot process ended on 2 September and was open to the IEC and ISO national member bodies from 104 countries, including 41 that are participating members of the joint ISO/IEC technical committee, JTC 1, Information technology.
Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes cast being negative.
Denmark Says No With Comments
Sep 1st
It’s official: Denmark has voted No with Comments to ISO/IEC DIS 29500 OOXML. See Danish Standards’ press release (in Danish). They are submitting 64 pages of comments, and state that Denmark will work for an approval assuming the comments will be addressed.
I’ve read through the comments, and find them balanced and thorough. It will require some substantial changes to EOOXML for it to address these comments. However, addressing the comments will also require changes to OpenDocument, because the gist of the comments is to ensure interoperability between the ISO document standards.
Good thing so many companies have recently joined the various standards committees, because if ISO follows the Danish recommendations, lots of work is yet to be done.
Gartner and the European Interoperability Framework 2.0
Jul 17th
Recently, the European Commission’s IDABC published a document written on contract by Gartner initiating the revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Architecture Guidelines (AG). Check out the EIF v2.0 Gartner-report.
I represented Denmark in the comittee that created the EIF and maintained the AG, so of course I read the Gartner-report with a biased view. Then again, I always tend to read documents from Gartner with a biased view.
These days I also read a lot of masters theses and other reports by my students, and I can’t help comparing the Gartner report to a student report.
The Commission asked Gartner inc. to “make a study, situating the European Interoperability Framework in relation to the current practices in the Member States and elsewhere and to give an independent view on the revision process and on its desired outcome.”
If the Gartner consultants were my students, they should fear the exam, because I would confront their problem understanding, their methods, their empirical depths/shallowness, and not least their pseudo-theoretical analysis and model-amok. Having said that, I admit to finding some of their proposals pretty interesting, for example, their Generic Public Services Framework is conceptually interesting, but not very well explained and motivated.
Researchwise, the Gartner report does not go into much if any detail with respect to the national interoperability frameworks that have been established in several member states: Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.
EIF presented a pretty clear definition of open standards. EIF 2.0 will, Gartner suggests, “allow open standards and other recognized standards to coexist”, and Gartner recommends not to focus on the use of open standards per se.
That calls for a campaign, someone decided. See openstandards.eu:
On the content of EIF v2.0, I ask
1. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards, as defined in the definition given by EIF v1.0 for all exchanges by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
2. that recommends the use of open source software, by public institutions and states, as did the EIF v1.0 document,
3. that EIF v2.0 recommends the use of open standards for all communications eg. documents, videos, sounds … they publish, to and with the public for example on their websites, by the public institutions in Europe, at the European Commission and all the member states, and conform to open standards for the tools they provide,On the elaboration process of EIF v2.0, I ask
1. for the explicite public consultation during a sufficiently long time, for the redaction of such an important report as EIF v2.0,
2. for the explicite participation of SMEs and a majority of members states for such a consultation and document redaction.
I signed it. Go sign it too!
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