Netherlands Picks ODF

7
4 years ago
by John Gøtze in

(Updated 20 September) 

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

0
4 years ago
by John Gøtze in

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.

Full announcement

Denmark Says No With Comments

2
4 years ago
by John Gøtze in , ,

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.

Interoperability, Change and Architecture

1
4 years ago
by John Gøtze in ,

Have you noticed how relatively little is written about enterprise architecture in government? Time to change that …

We started writing this report as a final deliverable from the ICA Study Group on Enterprise Architecture in Government, which we co-founded back in 2003. Having done that, we then thought, why not keep writing. So we did.

The result is, we hope, a report that anyone concerned with transformational government will find worthwhile reading.

Our concern is government enterprise architecture, which in our view is far from “a big fat joke”1. Having said that, we also find a gap between what we see in government EA around the world and what we would like to see.

That’s how Olov Östberg and I start off our report, Interoperability, Change and Architecture (PDF, 1,2MB), to the International Council for Information Technology in Government Administration, ICA, and the EA world at large.

We would love to get comments on the report.

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