Enterprisey thoughts – John Gøtze
Posts tagged danish_parliament
Something IS Rotten in the State of Denmark
May 11th
Leif Lohdal is blogging much more continuously about the Danish open standards situation than I am. Time for me to catch up.
On 24 April, the Danish Open Source Business Association and the Danish IT Industry Association arranged a conference in Parliament, from which I reported (in Danish, like most of the following links) over at Version2. Peter Strickx made a good presentation (soundtrack) about the situation in Belgium.
On the same day, Prosa and Version2 arranged a debate meeting about document standards. They had invited René Løhde from Microsoft Denmark and me to meet in a “battle”. I used the opportunity to make a probably too long presentation, which I symbolically called The State of the Document World, and tried to give an “Inconvenient Truth”-style presentation, but appearently contributed to critics calling the debate “toothless”. The “battle” without a fight was made available online as a webcast a few days ago. I’ve now uploaded my presentation in PDF (1,8MB) or higher quality (7,3MB) ODP. I humbly reject to calling my message toothless! Not to say it couldn’t be presented better, of course.
But wait, there’s more. A lot is happening, really. As a measure of “things happening” in the document format field, Version2 has published 12 articles mentioning ODF/OpenXML since the conference and battle.
The theme is: Should government mandate one or two standards? The choices are the ODF-alone strategy or the dual-strategy with ODF and/or OpenXML.
Yesterday morning, the involved parliamentarians and the minister met in a closed meeting. Less than a day before that meeting, the minister had released 2 reports to the parliamentarians and publically in a three (!) days long hearing. The reports, in Danish only, examine the economic consequences of mandating standards in various areas; one report dedicated to the consequences of choosing ODF. It’ll cost 180 million kroner. Yeah, right. The reports are made by Rambøll Management (yes, them, see also their explaning the appearent shift in findings).
Helge Sander, the minister, said after the meeting that a decision is near. The parliamentarians follow the situation close, and Sander will before the summer holidays arrange for them to meet some experts, he said. Whether or not a decision will be made by him before is uncertain. He surely could, if he would – he’s the minister! I assume the parliamentarians will ride him whatever he does.
In conclusion: Decisive indecision rules over Denmark.
Mandatory Open Standards in Denmark
Feb 24th
I’d be interested in the international reactions to this piece of news:
On Friday, the Danish Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Helge Sander, made a press announcement (Danish) about his plan for following up on the Parliament Resolution 8 months ago.
The implementation plan is presented in a report which suggests that “open standards should be implemented gradually by making it mandatory for the public sector to use a number of open standards when this becomes technically feasible”.
The report identifies an initial sets of open standards as candidates for mandatory use from 1 January 2008 “if an economic impact assessment shows that this will not involve additional costs to the public sector”.
The implementation plan’s elements are as follows:
- “From 1 January 2008, all new public IT solutions should make use of the mandatory open standards relevant to the IT solution in question unless there are significant reasons for not complying with these standards.
- If there are significant reasons for not complying with the relevant mandatory open standards, this must be reported on signing the contract, stating the reasons for applying the exceptional provisions.
- In case of IT solutions where the technical procurement is above the EU tendering limit, the reasons must be reported to the National IT and Telecom Agency for the purpose of publication.
- All ministers must ensure that mandatory standards are drawn up within their respective areas of responsibility where this is relevant. This must be made in cooperation with local/regional administrations in line with the existing common public projects in the area of digitalization.”
In short: The Danish Interoperability Framework gets a new level of status: Mandatory.
The proposed mandatory standards from 1 January 2008 falls within the following areas:
- Standards for data interchange between public authorities
- Standards for electronic file and document handling
- Standards for exchanging documents between public authorities (Open Document Format and Office OpenXML)
- Standards for electronic procurement in the public sector
- Standards for digital signatures
- Standards for public websites / homepages
- Standards for IT security (only within the public sector)
Around a dozen standards: Compliant XHTML or HTML, complaint CSS, WAI Level 2, OCES (digital signature), XML 1.0, XML Schema 1.0, NDR 3.0, FESD (docuument management), OIOUBL, UNSPSC, and DS484 (ISO 17799).
With regard to standards for exchanging documents between public authorities, the report proposes that “it should be mandatory to use at least one of the document standards Open Document Format or Office OpenXML”, and that it is up to the individual agency to decide what they want. The report explains that a study will be conducted this year with “the purpose of obtaining the necessary experience with these standards before 1 January 2008″.
A revised governance model should ensure more mandatory standards over time. The minister is given more authority, but not much actual power to rule over the sectors. The report goes into the “comply or explain”-principle and how it will be practised, and here, it discusses exceptions … I’ll quote in length from their English summary:
“Requirements regarding the use of mandatory open standards will not involve any obligation or incentive to expedite procurement, upgrading or implementation of new or existing IT solutions by public authorities.
…
To ensure the value of open standards to the individual authority, it is important to avoid the authority being compelled to make inappropriate choices. For this reason, a number of exceptions are made to the general rule of using mandatory open standards.
In connection with contracts and development projects, authorities are exempted from the rules of using mandatory open standards if this means that the authority is compelled to adopt a solution which:
- is significantly more expensive in relation to using other standards,
- degrades the security level critically in relation to using other standards,
- involves a significant reduction in functional performance which is a direct result of the solution being based on mandatory open standards,
- increases the implementation time markedly,
- leads to conflicts with standards applicable within specific areas as a result of international commitments.
Furthermore, public authorities are exempted from the rules of using mandatory open standards if the solution does not involve data interchange with other systems.
In case one or more of the points above are in evidence, the relevant authority may choose to dispense with specific mandatory open standards for the solution concerned.
New solutions where technical procurement involves overall costs exceeding the EU tendering limit must be reported to the National IT and Telecom Agency on signing the contract, stating the reasons for applying the exceptional provisions.
New solutions with overall costs below this limit should also make use of mandatory open standards, unless they fall within the exceptional provisions. However, these solutions are not subject to the reporting requirement.
Download the English summary as PDF or ODF. The full report in Danish is here.
The consultation period ends 23 March.
On the radio: Sutor, Munk and Gøtze
Feb 16th
During Bob Sutor’s visit in Copenhagen (I posted the homemade video with Bob Sutor the other day), I had organised for him to be interviewed by DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation, national public radio).
Tonight, DR brought the interview with Bob in their program Harddisken (third section), with an almost half-hour long theme about open standards hosted by Henrik Føhns. He had invited me in the studio for comments and debate with Marie Munk, Deputy Director General in the National IT and Telecom Agency. Bob apprears in edited and partly-translated form, but Marie and I were live on the air (and didn’t get to hear Bob!). So, it was there and then. Afterwards, of course – oh, why didn’t I say this and that, and all that, but it was also fun being live.
The whole show is now downloadable as a podcast — the Harddisken podcast-feed should reach 10.000 users, I was told, and is the third most used podcast of all in DR. Go get the podcast and help Harddisken become the most downloaded podcast! (of course, it’s in Danish, but the music is great 
– and Bob does get a bit of airtime, which of course is in English). About two-thirds into the MP3-file.
Since I cannot get DRs online radio and their fancy DRPlayer to work in my system (Mac OSX, Firefox) I chose not to link to those services here … but want to say to DR: Thank you for the podcasts!
ODF in Denmark
May 27th
[Note: Almost all links here are in Danish]
The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation will from 1 September 2006 make its online publications and other written communication available in ODF. That was announced by Minister of Science, Helge Sander, during an open consultation meeting in the Science and Technology Committee of the Danish Parliament held on 23 May. Mr Sander said that “the use of open standards is essential to the development of e-government”, and that the decision to publish in ODF is “a first step”, and will be evaluated after a 6-months trial period.
Mr Sander and his ministry has been under pressure for a while on the issue of open standards. The consultation meeting was called after the first reading of Morten Helveg‘s Proposal for Parliamentary Resolution on Open Standards (B103) in the Chamber of the Parliament. The second and final reading is still pending. I summarized the resolution here; it basically goes much further in enforcing open standards.
Mr Sander and the Liberal-Conservative Government has opposed the resolution, which is put forward by the opposition. The resolution does however appeal to not only the opposition parties, but also the Government’s support party (Danish People’s Party, far-right) whose Morten Messerschmidt and Jørgen Dohrman however do hesitate supporting the resolution due to unknown economical effects. Those concerns have been at the heart of the debates, and been Mr Sander’s main argument against the resolution.
On the day before the consultation meeting, the Danish daily newspaper, Berlingske.dk, published a news story, “Secret Report”, where they revealed the conclusions from an internal report from the ministry. Mr Sander promptly decided to send the report to the Committee and hence make it publically available, in order “to avoid any myth creation”, he said. The report is an initial analysis of the economic effects of enfording the use of open standards, and it concludes that although it is not possible to put an exact figure on the total costs (and benefits) of enforcing open standards at large, there is much reason in making open standards compulsory where interoperability is at stake. The report is dated December 2005, but I can reveal that the bulk text is even older, as I was the main author of the report as one of the last tasks I did before I left the ministry in September 2005. I’m glad the report is now public, so I can refer to it. I just re-read it, and although I personally might not agree to everything in it – it being a product of many opinions and “government speak” – it is still a good read, I’d dare say.
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