Bob Sutor gave an excellent presentation on Wednesday at the IT University of Copenhagen. In the middle of his talk, it occured to me that my TyTN gadget has a video camera, so here’s 7.38 minutes with Bob, where he’s talking about why open standards are important:
Then memory ran out. I managed to delete some stuff, and grabbed another 4.38 minutes with this clip where Bob talks about open source and innovation.
Update: More video from the talk in Peter Toft’s blog.
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!
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.
That was easy. First, I claimed it, then checked it, then mapped it and then checked it again, and now I guess I can claim my identity is gotze.eu. My public persona is currently at gotze.myopenid.com. I’m playing with my own IdP, but that’s not ready yet.
OpenID is cool. To show you just how cool it is, try this: Using your own OpenID, try making a comment to this entry. You should be able to identify yourself with OpenID on this blog. Thanks to this great plugin.
I wonder if anyone can recommend Perl libraries for OpenID? I notice there’s also a MT-plugin which I guess use Perl-libraries. Got to try that out. But in general, if anyone could explain what kind of work will be needed to OpenID-enable a web application, please holler!
I’m going – are you? The third annual OASIS Adoption Forum is held in London on 27-29 November. The forum is themed Enabling Efficiency between Government, Business and the Citizen: Managing Secure Interactions in Sector Applications, and the list of presenters is very impressive. Also note that a Workshop on the State and Future of PKI has just been announced being part of the event. There will be sessions about adoption of OASIS standards such as SAML, XACML, and WS-Security.
OASIS Adoption Forum “seeks to educate and expose security leaders and professionals to the tools, standards and implementations that are transforming security interactions and relationships between citizens, businesses, governmental institutions and agencies. With increasing threats encompassing everything from hacking to identity theft, providing a secure environment must be a major objective for companies, governments, and organizations worldwide. The success you enjoy tomorrow depends on the security decisions you make today”.
A forthcoming book, Open Source for Knowledge And Learning Management, edited by Miltiadis Lytras and Ambjorn Naeve has a substantial chapter – “Methodological Considerations in Strategizing the Use of Open Source in the Public Sector” – that I co-wrote with Christian Wernberg-Tougaard, Kristoffer Herning, and Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz, all of Unisys.
In our chapter, we present and discuss an evaluation model build to describe the different layers of impact on a government organisation when deciding whether to use open source or traditional software.
The book should be available in December, just in time for the Christmas shopping! It can already now be pre-ordered from Amazon.
Bonus link: Christian has a blog. Subscribed.
The Danish debates about open standards continues. Over at Ingeniøren, we are covering the development extensively and continuously, but only in Danish. On Monday, we brought a story with roughly the same title as this entry’s title.
The story is about the so-called Rambøll-report, which is a report about the costs related to switching to open standards for document formats in the Danish government. The report is made by Rambøll Management, a Danish consultancy, on behalf of The Danish Open Source Business Association (OSL).
The report establishes three scenarios for the development:
Scenario 1: Microsoft Office and ECMA Office Open XML. Would cost 380 million kroner over 5 years with migration to MS Office 2007; 105 million kroner if using current versions with plug-in.
Scenario 2: OpenOffice.org and ODF. Would cost 255 million kroner over 5 years, covering all migrations costs plus already existing MS licence costs until outphased.
Scenario 3: Microsoft Office (with plug-in) and ODF. Would have only marginally higher costs than in scenario 1.
The Open Source Business Association Rambøll Management estimates that the whole of government (including local government) could save 550 million kroner by migrating to OpenOffice.org and ODF. That’s around 94 million US Dollars. Quite a lot of money for a small country like Denmark.
Three politicians from Parliament, Morten Helveg, Morten Messerschmidt and Anne Grete Holmsgaard, participated in the press conference about the report on Monday. These three were the driving forces behind B103, the Parliamentary decision about open standards. All three expressed satisfaction with and support to the report’s recommendations. Messerschmidt even offered to personally bring it over to the Minister of Finance, who on Tuesday will present the Annual Budget.
There are no official comments from Government. Last week, a governmental committee published a report about interoperability. That report recommended a number of initiatives, but was also criticised for being indecisive on many issues, for example those related to document formats. The Parliament Order states that government must use open standards, and sets January 1, 2008 as a deadline for the implementation. “It’s hardly time to be indecisive now”, as Morten Helveg commented.
In an unsurprising move, Microsoft Denmark totally dismissed the Rambøll-report. They were also the first to comment on the governmental report, which they found good and constructive.
Update: By request of Rambøll Management, we brought an update. Their report only speaks about the state, and they will not draw conclusions for the complete public sector. The $ 94 million figure is suggested by the Open Source Business Association, based on data from IDC.
The esteemed scholary journal MIS Quarterly has issued a Special Issue on Standard Making.
The introductory article by the editors Kalle Lyytinen and John Leslie King, Standard Making: A Critical Research Frontier For Information Systems Research, is freely available, as are abstracts for all articles, but you need access to a research database to get online access to full-text articles.
It is great to see the emerging scholary interest in standards. Kudos to Lyytinen and King for the initiative to the special issue, which I understand has been underway for several years.
The seven articles in the special issue cover a range of issues. In Lyytinen and King’s words:
… the accepted papers embody a rich variety of approaches to account for standardization processes and outcomes. Studies focusing on standard creation draw mainly upon institutional analyses, power analyses or collective action theory and associated action dilemmas (e.g. prisoner’s dilemma). Standards choice draws from economic theories of network effects, path dependency and switching costs. Standards impact embodies theories of how firms at the industry level can mitigate against increased transparency and lower barriers to entry created by open standards, as well as sociological analyses that try to explain why expected benefits of standardization orders did not emerge. The papers overall exhibit a significant variation in levels and unit of analysis, from individual firms to industries to types of standards or standardization outcome, and research methodology, from modeling and simulation to ethnographic studies of standardization processes. This shows how IS standardization research is likely to benefit from multiple research methodologies that also promote cross-pollination of ideas.
I found the paper by Jeffrey Nickerson and Michael zur Muehlen, The Ecology of Standards Processes: Insights from Internet Standard Making, particularly interesting. Nickerson and zur Muehlen analyze the emergence of new web service choreography standards, and trace a decade of workflow standardization processes as “a set of legitimizing moves where actors, ideas, and institutions constantly and randomly collide to create a standard, which is technically acceptable and institutionally ‘forceful’ for future adoption”. The analysis shows that “institutional ecologies associated with Internet standards are not driven solely by economic calculus but that other norms and values, like elegance, design spirit, or technical wizardry, count in making ecologies viable”.
Standard-making in the IS field involves at least 400 standards bodies and consortia, and many thousands standard-makers. In itself a huge ecosystem with many “species”. As the recent years’ developments around XML-based document formats show, there is a lot of competition within the ecosystem, or between various ecosystems.
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.
On Friday (June 2, 2006), the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) had its last session before the Summer break, and on a very long agenda, the very last issue (#57) was the second and last reading of Morten Helveg‘s Proposal for Parliamentary Resolution on Open Standards (B103). I posted a bit about it earlier this week, and said then that it was still pending, and that it was opposed by the Government. That was accurate information as of a week ago.
But politics is the art of changing things, and over the last week, crafty politicians have been at work, and changed things. Morten Helveg pushed for settlement, and then Danish People’s Party’s Morten Messerschmidt and Jørgen Dohrman put their fingerprint on the resolution with an ammendment, so a majority vote would be reached. And to cut a long story (see below) short, on Friday afternoon, the Parliament voted and decided the following resolution (my translation):
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 Government should adopt and maintain a set of open standards by 1 January 2008, or as soon as technically possible, 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 Government 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.
Note that the translation is mine, and might not be 100% accurate. It for example differs slightly from the one provided on Groklaw. Furthermore, the original decision in Danish is actually not now available yet in the Parliament’s public information system (case file here, around 50 documents, in Danish), so be advised that a formal translation of the decision is, well, pending.
The challenge is not just one of language nuances between Danish and English, but indeed also one of interpretation of the resolution itself, and of its reach and scope in particular. And here caution is an absolute necessity, because we know how distorted things in our field always get.
A few specific observations:
At any rate, Friday was indeed a good day for the Danish IT policy, as Morten Helveg also said during the reading in Parliament. On Saturday, he made a post tited Victory! (Sejr!) in his blog. He writes (my translation):
…
But it was a bizarre procedure. Wednesday afternoon, the Liberals attempted to outvote the resolution’s formal vote-taking. Completely uheard of! Then the Standing Orders Committee intervened to ensure that I of course could get my resolution to a vote in Parliament.A majority without the Government was established with Danish People’s Party, and then the Liberals and the Conservatives turned on a dime. Even if it was a pitiful attempt to demean the resolution made by the Liberals, considering they would vote for the resolution. It didn’t make sense. I think it was pretty clear to everyone who saw the debates that the Liberals were out on a limb.
…
On Thursday before the Parliament session, Michael Aastrup Jensen from the Liberals made a press announcement where he announced that the Liberals would vote for the resolution. The argument put forward is that the proposal carries good intentions. But Jensen also argues that the resolution will have no effects, and that the Liberals would have wanted to go even further. During the reading session, his tone sharpened, and he called the resolution “empty symbol politics of the worst kind”.
Helge Sander, the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, is from the Liberals. On August 15, he has invited the IT-spokespersons from Parliament to a meeting, where he according to Jensen will present how the Government wants to proceed.
In conclusion, the vote in Parliament ended in an unanimous decision, but not in fence-mending. Quite the contrary, actually.
But at the end of the day, and that’s what counts, Denmark is now a nation who has a parliamentary mandate for open standards. Thank you to the three Mortens: Morten Helveg, Morten Messerschmidt and Morten Østergaard, and to Jørgen Dohrman and Anne Grete Holmsgaard for carrying this through, and thanks also to Michael Aastrup Jensen and Helge Sander, and all other MPs for voting for this historic resolution!
Bonus news: In the report from the Science Committee, one can read that there’s more to ODF in Denmark: Also the Ministry of Finance will from September 1, 2006 publish its new publications in ODF “unless certain contractual or content-related conditions occur”. The Government aims to have 3-4 or more ministries in the pilot launched by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.
So, we will have concrete ODF adoption projects in Denmark. Now. Very exciting! Kudos to Helge Sander for rolling that showball! Why didn’t you make decisions like that when I worked for you? Allow me to give you a hint: You know about Massachusetts, right? Did you know that they recently made a Request for Information (RFI) titled “OpenDocument Format Plug-in for Microsoft Office Suite”, and got some very interesting response? You should get your guys to talk to guys in Massachusetts. You could also make your own RFI, of course.
Danish readers: I posted more over at my Danmark 2.0 blog.