Gotze.eu

Tag: Openization

  • Next: Canada, US, and Iceland

    As indicated in a 140 char note on Twitter, I’m leaving Europe. For a month, that is. I am going on a flight/roadtrip, part work, part vacation. Locationwise roughly as follows:

    • Toronto from July 17th to 25th.
    • Washington, DC from July 26th to 31st.
    • Ottawa from July 31st to August 6th.
    • Boston from August 7th to 14th.
      oh, and then a stopover in Iceland:
    • Reykjavík from August 14th to 18th.

    Along the way I will attend The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto, where I have three contributions: Particapant in Panel Discussion and podcast on Architecture’s Scope Extends Beyond the Enterprise, my lecture Coherency Management and the Future of Enterprise Architecture, and participant in Panel Discussion: Enterprise-Centric Architecture and the Role of “Business”.

    I will probably sneak in a bunch of meetings around the Coherency Management book, which is now with the printer, and with a bit of luck, will be able to announce a few events around the book as I travel on. And then I’m planning some meetings around a new book project I plan to announce shortly. Which reminds me: allow me to introduce two new tags: Government 2.0 and Open Government.

    If you are located – or happen to be – in one of the locations I visit, and are interested in any of the tags to this post, and want to meet, get in touch.

  • Good Enough Standards? No Way

    Two of my students (Michael and Søren) did an interesting small project about the “document format war” in december, and we had a good discussion at the exam here this week. They’d interviewed three key actors in the Danish OpenXML/ODF-debate, and presented a very decent, if slightly biased, analysis.

    But bias seem to be the menu of the day everywhere in the document debates. Burton Group’s What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications was bashed for being biased.

    And of course, there are all the biased bloggers. Take Stephen McGibbon’s IBM’s Director of Strategy comes clean on OpenXML or Rob Weir’s What every engineer knows or Russell Ossendryver’s ISO should kick OOXML off the standards bus. Biased, biased, biased. More biased than ever, if possible. And now also in Danish.

    BTW, this made me laugh: Note the Google ads on Russell Ossendryver’s blog. On top is this link, hardly endorsed by Ossendryver, one would imagine …

    In the debates about document formats, let’s not forget that most people and organisations still use the old binary documents. And now there may be hope. See Brian Jones: Mapping documents in the binary format (.doc; .xls; .ppt) to the Open XML format. Microsoft will release a Binary Format-to-OpenXML translator project on SourceForge, and not least, publish the binary format documentation under their Open Specification Promise. I’m pretty sure someone will finds things to complain about regardless of how “open” the binary formats are. But Microsoft has indeed just bought themselves some goodwill.

    So what happens next? OpenXML’s ISO fast track process is about to hit an important milestone. In late February, some 120 ISO-delegates from 40 countries will meet in Geneva to review Ecma’s proposed resolution of 3,522 comments on OpenXML. After this meeting, the national bodies will have 30 days to reconsider their original vote. Andy Updegrove’s ODF vs. OOXML on the Eve of the BRM is a great analysis of the process so far. Of course Andy is also biased, but he does some pretty solid research, and provides a compelling argument for how the standardisation system is broken.

    I live in Denmark, a country that said No in September. It was one of those “with comments” no’s, and I’m pretty sure my country is one of those that Microsoft hope will change its vote at or after the Geneva meeting.

    Jasper Bojsen, CTO in Microsoft Denmark, yesterday wrote (in Danish) about myths about Microsoft and ODF. He argues that there are differences between ODF and OpenXML, and that both standards should be ISO approved so that ISO can take charge of making them more interoperable.

    Hmmm. That almost makes sense. No, wait, it doesn’t. It’s not ISO’s job to make standards interoperable. To become an ISO standard in the first place, a standard must be “a good citizen” which includes being interoperable.

    It may well be that Ecma’s proposed resolution has made OpenXML a better standard, but as far as I can tell, nearly nothing has been done about enabling interoperability with existing ISO-standards. But unless they twist the words, thankfully some improvements have been done, for example it does seem that VML is out of the spec.

    So if ISO now goes ahead and approves OpenXML’s fast track, what will be the motivation for Ecma and Microsoft to work for interoperability with other standards? As quoted here, Microsoft intends to stick to OpenXML regardless of what ISO decides, because it’s what their product uses.

    At the end of the day, we are talking about standards, not markets, and not products. ISO makes standards, or, Standards, the real thing, not those pesky consortium standards! The market uses the standards when creating competitive products, and the standards are what makes the markets “work”. Only when standards are truly open and interoperable across ecosystems will their markets work. This is why standards bodies should only accept standards that can demonstrate truly independent and “complete” implementations in products by competing market actors. Is this enough? I don’t think so.

  • Democracy and XML

    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)

  • Netherlands Picks ODF

    (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

    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

    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

    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!

  • Double Standards? Trial Mandation of Dual Standards

    Jason Matusow of Microsoft: Denmark Says ODF and Open XML Ok. Jason calls it “a very positive step forward”. Leif Lodahl of OpenOffice DK also reports: One year evaluation, and comments: “There is no doubt that ODF is here to stay, but Microsoft must prove openness and willingness to other platforms and applications”.
    Lars Roark, CIO in Rødovre Municipality, in an article in Version2 (Danish) says that “it’s a pity they didn’t have the courage to make a decision to only use ODF”,  and argues that “selecting ODF would have been the logical choice”.

    I’ve not yet seen a public version of the finalised agreement between the minister and the parties.
    Meanwhile, the process in Danish Standards around OOXML is such that a public hearing is closing for comments on 2 July.

  • Microsoft and Danish Government in New Identity Deal

    A year ago, my former collegue Søren Peter Nielsen wrote, on behalf of the Danish government, a letter to Microsoft. Seems he got a response, and I’m sure it’ll interest XMLGrrl and many others, that an announcement was made yesterday: Agreement between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft: Agreement concerning partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard.

    “The ongoing dialog between the National IT and Telecom Agency and Microsoft has resulted in an agreement on partial support of the SAML 2.0 standard in Microsoft’s forthcoming version of their federation product named Active Directory Federation Services 2”, the agency writes.

    The text agreed upon is as follows:

    “The Danish public sector has chosen SAML 2.0 as their federation standard. Microsoft products use WS-Federation and WS-Trust as the foundation of their federated identity architecture. The Danish government has agreed that the SAML 2.0 token format is sufficient to provide basic interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 environments as a common assertion format, without loss of authentication integrity.

    To support interoperability between WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 based products Microsoft has agreed to support the SAML 2.0 token format in the future release of Active Directory Federation Services code-named Active Directory Federation Services “2”. Microsoft will provide the Danish public sector Centre of Service Oriented Infrastructure with pre-release code to help analysis and planning of solutions for integrating WS-Federation-based clients in the Danish federation, and to collect feedback on the feature implementation.

    In addition, the co-authors of WS-Federation (including Microsoft) have submitted the specification to OASIS for standardization. This step further enables interoperability between federated environments that deploy SAML 2.0-based products and those that deploy WS-Federation-based products.”

    In commenting the agreement, the agency writes: “With this agreement a possibility for inclusion of Microsoft based clients in a common public SAML 2.0 based federation has opened”, and notes:

    The integration will require the standard based login solutions to be expanded with a special integration code. The solution is therefore a pragmatic tactical integration solution, but with the above-mentioned partial SAML 2.0 support from Microsoft it is expected that the integration can be done without influencing the individual “Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service” user organizations.

    The agency notes that more iinformation on the concrete possibilities will be published as the National IT and Telecom Agency’s Centre for Service Oriented Infrastructure receives pre-release code from Microsoft that can be integration tested.
    The agency elaborates a bit more on the deal:

    It is still desired, that Microsoft support all of the SAML 2.0 standard in their products, but the above-mentioned agreement are a good first step towards more convergence among standards for transverse user management.

    The National IT and Telecom Agency also sees the filing of the WS-Federation (WS-FED) specification for standardization in OASIS as a step that can promote convergence among federation standards.

    It should be stressed that it does not mean that the WS-Federation specification is recommended equally to SAML 2.0 for common public solutions.

    When the results of the standardization with WS-Federation become available (expectedly in the end of 2008) it might be relevant to do a new assessment but for now the SAML 2.0 it is still the only standard, which is recommended as a federation standard for Danish common public solutions.

    So, there we have it.

    I want to congratulate Søren Peter on a job well done. Stand firm on SAML 2.0, the open ecosystem needs it. And thanks to Microsoft for listening to customers (but why only partial support?).

  • Norwegians Launch Interoperability Framework, Mandate ODF

    Norway’s Minister of Government Administration and Reform, also Minister of IT, Ms Heidi Grande Røys, in a press announcement on Friday, Første skritt mot en offentlig sektor uten leverandørbindinger, announced that with the launch of the Norwegian Government’s interoperability framework, called Referansekatalog for IT-standarder), the Norwegian government takes “the first step towards a public sector without vendor fixation”.

    Of particular interest is that the Norwegian government boldly goes ahead and proposes mandation of a set of standards for document formats:

    • ODF is mandated for document exchange and downloads of editable documents. According to the framework document, OASIS ODF 1.0 is the standard used, but the reference link actually goes to ODF 1.1.
    • PDF is mandated for publication of static documents on the web.
    • UTF-8 (ISO/IEC 10646) is mandated as a universal character set standard, to be used in web publications, connections to registres and databases, and all other textual exchange and archiving.

    Regarding ODF, according to Digi.no, Ms Røys at the press conference said she wants ODF to be the preferred document format also internally in the administration, and not “just” for external communication. But as I read the published documents, there is no actual mandation of internal use. One could – and should – of course argue that ODF “all the way” is the only sensible way to implement the policy, but I’m sure some will argue otherwise.
    According to the press announcement, the interoperability framework is in consultion until 20 August 2008. I suppose they actually mean 20 August 2007. The mandation is proposed enacted by 1 January 2009.

    Included in the interoperability framework is a set of national government standards, such as NOARK4 for archiving, and also a plan for extending the framework to other areas. On the latter, the document analyses the Danish, Belgian, German and British interoperability frameworks standard by standard, and explicitely argues that a European alignment and cooperation is necessary.

    Danish coverage at Version2