Posts tagged Denmark

Assessing Standards

0
5 years ago
by John Gøtze in ,

Following up on my recent blog entry, Mandatory Open Standards in Denmark, I want to draw attention to further reports published by the National IT and Telecom Agency as background material to the main report. These materials are all in English.
First is a report called Research about OpenXML, ODF & PDF made for the Danish government by Norwegian consultancy house Ovitas AS.

The criteria covered in the research report include three main areas:
1. Openness (open documentation, rights, open interface, open meeting, consensus, due process)
2. Market issues (penetration, maturity, implementation)
3. Business potentials (functional and non-functional requirements, security, potentials and architecture)
In conclusion, they write:

The conclusion of this preliminary research is that both OpenXML and ODF qualify as viable candidates for open standards for editorial document formats based on the criteria used in this research. PDF is currently controlled by Adobe Systems but has a unique worldwide take up.

“Viable candidates”? Hmmm. Nevertheless, the report is a fairly balanced analysis, which on several accounts makes it very clear, that there are big differences between the standards. One could, reasonably I’d argue, ask how the conclusion is supported by the research. I miss the substantial argument for how low a barrier one should have for what is and what isn’t a viable candidate.

It is worth noting that the hearing report in appendix A (only in Danish) has a quite thorough outline of how standard assessments should be conducted. The Norwegians does note that their work was done in parallel to the development of this outline, so I suppose we can’t blame them. But one would expect more from the Danish administration then. What is missing is exactly the specific “scores” for, or evaluations of, various detailed issues. If we assume such scores are red/yellow/green, my bet is that OOXML would have quite a few yellows if not reds, which would need some explaining in order to make the conclusion valid.

More serious research
The government commissioned a research project about “Open Standards and their Early Adoption” in 2005-06. This was conducted by Professor Mogens Kühn Pedersen and Vladislav V. Fomin from Department of Informatics at Copenhagen Business School, and their final report is also available (download report, literature review and delphi survey). The report’s executive summary:

Standards have proven themselves indispensable to the industrial revolution. How are standards developed today? What does the economics of standards tell about the impact of standards upon economic growth and productivity? Do standards influence industry innovation? How are the standardization processes in the field of ICT taking place? How and why do open standards differ from other types of standards? How may open standards influence ICT government policy and the reverse: How will government need to take action in the face of the international trend toward open standards in ICT?

The reports perhaps raises more questions than they answer. But read them you must.

Mandatory Open Standards in Denmark

2
5 years ago
by John Gøtze in ,

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

0
5 years ago
by John Gøtze in

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!

Local History of Standards

1
5 years ago
by John Gøtze in , , ,

Quoting myself:

This article discusses current and recent developments in Denmark, where open standards have become a central policy issue. Although Denmark is prone for leading the way in true, large-scale openization, a full-blown effort towards these ends is highly unlikely.

That’s the abstract of an article I wrote for translation into Spanish and publication in Novática, the journal of the Spanish CEPIS society ATI, Asociación de Técnicos de Informática, issue 184 (November-December 2006).

The editor, Llorenç Pagés, is also Chief Editor of Upgrade, The European Journal for the Informatics Professional, and will also there soon publish an issue about ODF, in which I will have an extended version of my article.

Llorenç allowed me to share my English manuscript, so I’ve uploaded it here: You can get the ODF-version or the web-version: A Brief History of Open Standards in Denmark, where the password is ODF ;-)

I invite comments on the article. I’m still working on the extended version, and think improvements are possible …
On a side-note, I had to hack WordPress to be able to upload ODF-files within it. Bugger, that should be a standard feature!!

On another side-note, you should be able to use OpenID when leaving your comment.

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