I’m in the US (Washington, Boston, Washington) from 26 Nov to 7 Dec.

I have been invited to come over to Washington, DC, to attend a researchers and practioners meeting in the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, which will be held Thu-Sat this coming week.

After that, I go to Boston for the XML 2007 conference.

Pop quiz: At which of these events will there be discussions about erosion of trust? (hint)

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.

UPGRADE, the European Journal for the Informatics Professional, has just published an Open Document Format Monograph.
The monograph is published on behalf of CEPIS by Novática (ATI, Spain), in English and in Spanish. The English version is available online: download as PDF, see content and summaries. The Spanish version is out in print and soon online.

I warmly recommend the monograph’s articles. I’m of course pleased about my contribution (announced earlier), but recommend reading several of the others first.

These are the articles:

OpenDocument Standard for Digital Documents
Jesús Tramullas-Saz and Piedad Garrido-Picazo, Guest Editors

Open by Design: The OpenDocument Format Standard for Office Applications
Erwin Tenhumberg, Donald Harbison, and Rob Weir

Is OpenDocument an Open Standard? Yes!
David A. Wheeler

OpenDocument Hidden Traps and their Side Effects on Free/Open Source Software
Marco Fioretti

ISO-26300 (OpenDocument) vs. MS-Office Open XML
Alberto Barrionuevo-García

Interoperability: Will the Real Universal File Format please Stand Up?
Sam Hiser and Gary Edwards

ODF: The Emerging Document Format of Choice for Governments
Marino Marcich

Promotion of the Use of Open Document Formats by the IDA and IDABC Programmes
Miguel A. Amutio-Gómez

A Brief History of Open Standards in Denmark
John Gøtze

Standard Open Formats and Libre Software in the Extremadura Public Administration
Luis Millán-Vázquez de Miguel

In a statement to me (on behalf of Danish Version2), ISO’s Manager of Communication Services, Roger Frost, has cordially confirmed Computerworld’s story. Not that I doubted Computerworld’s Eric Lai, but I just wanted to make sure.

Frost writes:

ISO and IEC are to issue ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (ECMA-376) “Office Open XML File Formats” in the near future for a five-month fast-track ballot by the participating members of the ISO/IEC joint technology committee ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology, and by all member bodies of ISO and IEC.

Interestingly, Frost also notes:

At the same time, comments made by JTC 1 member bodies on the document during the 30-day review prior to acceptance for fast-tracking processing, along with the response to these comments from the fast-track proposal submitter, Ecma International, will be made available to the JTC 1 members and ISO and IEC member bodies. The national body comments and Ecma’s response are not available from ISO or IEC or JTC 1. It is up to the individual organizations whether they wish to release their comments or response.

In the interest of an open process (hey, we’re talking about open standards here!), I hope all national bodies will publish their responses. Some have “leaked” already of course, but it would be good for the process to show a bit much more openness.

I talked to the chairman of the Danish subcommitte, professor Mogens Kühn Pedersen from Copenhagen Business School today, and he told me that the Danish subcommittee will meet on Tuesday next week. I have suggested to Mogens that he asks the committee for permission to publish the Danish response.

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!

Bob Sutor is in Copenhagen, and will give a public lecture at the IT University at 5pm today, Wednesday. He’ll talk about what’s going on with open standards and why it’s important, also to IT students. I’ve reserved the big lecture hall (Aud 1), and everyone is welcome to join us.

I’m certain that Bob will talk about the situation around document formats, where a lot is happening. Just covering the past couple of days’ events around the standards is a talk in itself: It’s clear now (!) that many standards bodies point to contradictions around Ecma Office Open XML and its submission to ISO, so the fast-track for Microsoft’s Office 2007 format becoming a standard is slowed down (at least, if not stopped?). In other news, two more US states gives more momentum to OpenDocument, and ODF passes yet another maturity signpost as ODF 1.1 is now an OASIS Standard.

Over at my Danmark 2.0 blog, I have suggested that the newly formed S-142/U-34 Danish Standards mirror committee to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 34 spend their time on making ODF a Danish Standard. That would be kind of ironic with all those Microsoft Gold Partners in the group, I know, but none the less, I’m deadly serious about the proposal!

I have been inspired by BELGIF for a while, but here is somethig that puts Belgium on The ODF Map:
Dominique Deckmyn of ZDNet reports (same here) some very interesting news from Belgium:

“In a blow to Microsoft, Belgium’s government departments will be instructed to use an open file format for internal communications.”

There is a press announcement from the Belgian Council of Ministers about “Use of open standards for the exchange of office documents”. The announcement is available in only French and Dutch, none of which are languages I am very proficient in, but as far as I can tell, the decision proposed by Mr. Peter Vanvelthoven, Minister for Employment and Computerization, was made Friday by the Council of Ministers, and essentially says:

“All federal government agencies must from September 2007 ensure that they can receive and read ODF documents. This does not exclude the use of other formats. It is up to each agency to determine the way in which the functionality of reading is guaranteed.

Depending on the results of an impact analysis carried out by Fedict, ODF will from September 2008 be the standard format used for the exchange of office documents.”

Someone who speaks French or Dutch, please verify my translation.