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Linuxforum 2006 here in Copenhagen was great. There’s a report at Groklaw.

In my view, the highlight was Simon Phipps‘ presentation. My favorite quote: “If you don’t join the network, you don’t get the effects”. It’s exactly the network effects that counts, and what make open standards so valuable.

Phipps announced the launch of the ODF Alliance, less than four hours after the official press release was launched. For coverage of the alliance news, see my OpenDocument tag, where I have collected reactions in press and blogs. The alliance launch is (further, as if we need more) proof that ODF has crossed the chasm.

I chaired a jam session with Louis Suárez-Potts, where he talked about the community of and around OpenOffice.org. The more I learn about OOo, the more impressed I get. I’ve now used OOo for almost four months, and am very happy with it. Sure, Calc could be better, but it does just fine for almost everything. Writer and Impress are actually better than their Microsoft counter-parts, IMHO. But the really cool thing about OOo is that it uses ODF natively, so I can go somewhere else if I want to.

Peter Quinn, the former state CIO of Massachusetts, is on a European speaking tour. Today he spoke in Copenhagen at a public meeting arranged by Prosa. He gave a great presentation (similar to this presentation from last week) about the work of ITD and their Technical Reference Model (TRM) in particular. The Mass TRM is known mainly for adopting and enforcing the OASIS Open Document Format (for more about this, see Andy Updegrove’s extensive coverage).

Quinn’s story is compelling and his message is extremely important. The message is that opennes is the path to technological prophylaxis. Governments need to transform, do more with less, and open standards and technologies are essential for making this work.

Quinn quotes John F. Kennedy: “There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

Here in Denmark – where, once in a while, the old Viking strain shows through – standards have already become a political issue, and I hope Quinn can help stirring up political attention (he’s meeting politicians, journalists and bureaucrats on Monday).

James Governor: Is XForms the killer app for enterprise AJAX?
Bob Sutor: The pieces are falling into place

XForms and AJAX – of course. And ODFand web service are not unrelated at all. It’s when used together these standards become really powerful. eGovernment is an obvious area for this. Or rather, it should be. But where are the real-world examples?? I still see lots of dumb PDF-forms are …

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The Danish weekly called Ingeniøren (Engineering Weekly) has on Friday an article, Politisk flertal kræver Ã¥bne it-standarder (Political majority requires open standards”) by Kurt Westh Nielsen. Kurt of course writes about our conference, and the fact that there was wide agreement among politicians that open standards are a good thing.

I’m quoted twice – and swear in one of the quotes (sorry Mom!). It’s about the use – or lack of use – of open standards in government online services. Indignation seemed a good approach, and I wasn’t the only one “caught” swearing …

The best quote of the day goes to Morten Kjærsgaard from OSL who closed the conference with an Elvis quote: a little less conversation, a little more action.

Bonus link: Sam Hiser: What is OpenDocument … Again?

DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) has an excellent weekly programme called Harddisken (The harddisk). This coming weekend’s show will bring a feature about open standards. Jeff Kaplan was interviewed for the show, and I’ll be in the studio talking about the Danish context.

The show will also be availlabe online, although not in an open standard – DR uses Microsoft’s WMA-format. I’ll be sure to mock them on that, on the air 🙂 At last week’s conference in Parliament, I also hit on DR for not using open standards.

Update: The show aired twice this weekend, and is also available online in two parts: Interview with Jeff Kaplan and interview with me. The full show is also available as a 51MB MP3-podcast. In the host Anders Høgh Nissen’s Hardblog he comes out with a strong recommendation of Morten Helveg’s motion in Parliament.

Friday’s open standards conference in the Danish Parliament was a big success, we all agreed. A full house of participants, a range of good presentations, and good deliberations and debates. Throughout the day, open standards were promoted, by policy makers, vendors and, well, everyone. As Morten Kjærsgaard from OSL concluded in closing the conference, it is not a question of open standards or not, but rather about how and when.

In his opening talk, Morten Helveg Petersen MP announced a consultation draft of a motion in Parliament about the use of open standards in Danish government. By blogging the draft text, and opening up for comments, Helveg has openized the policy making process in a web 2.0 way. In this spirit, it seems appropriate to label his initiative B64 2.0, but actually it’s an appropriate name because it basically is a reintroduction of his own motion B64 from last session of Parliament. The motion’s draft text in my draft translation goes like this:

Parliament imposes on the government a duty to ensure that the public sector’s use of IT, including use of software, is based on open standards.

The state should adopt and maintain a set of open standards by 1 January 2008 which can serve as an inspiration for the rest of the public sector. Open standards should be part of public IT and software procurement with the object of promoting competition.

The state should ensure that all digital information and data that the public sector exchanges with citizens, companies and institutions, are available in open standards based formats.

I encourage all bloggers, and everybody else, to post comments to Morten’s blog on this important issue. If you post a copy of your comments here, I’ll provide an XML-feed of comments, as an inspiration to Morten, and a convenient way to keep track of comments.

Tags: B64 2.0, B64, open standards

Jeff Kaplan is in Copenhagen this week, as one of the international keynote speakers at our open standards conference on Friday. We’ve had to close for registrations due to seat restrictions in Parliament, so I hope you have already registred if you wanted to join us.

If you want to meet Jeff and also Susan Struble from Sun Microsystems, we’ll have an informal meeting here Thursday from 17-19. Just come to the IT-University, aud 2.