I am pleased to announce that the book, State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards, is now in production and will be available for ordering in your favorite bookshop very soon.
But wait, there’s more: On 18 November, the free, online version will be available from 21gov.net.
Read the press release.
Follow the book @gov20book on Twitter. The book’s twitter hashtag is #gov20book. Also, follow the list of contributors.
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:
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 “Businessâ€.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crimeBertolt Brecht
To Posterity (1938)
(German: An die Nachgeborenen; Danish: Til Efterkommerne)
The Council of Europe invited me to participate in Forum for the Future of Democracy held in Sigtuna in Sweden this week. The general theme was Power and empowerment: the interdependence of democracy and human rights.
I was invited to make a contribution in a break-out session about eDemocracy – key role in facilitating and strengthening democratic processes? There were, appropriately I think, many other – and bigger – themes than eDemocracy brought up during the three forum days, as the overall conclusions show, but let me nevertheless emphasize these two conclusions:
27. Information and communication technologies can be a powerful tool for the promotion and protection of human rights and democracy. They have the potential to create more transparent and responsive government and to facilitate participatory democracy. Human rights should be respected in a digital as well as in a non-digital environment and should not be subject to restrictions other than those provided for in the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights simply because communication is carried in digital form. E-governance policies, embedded in an appropriate regulatory framework, should enhance democracy and respect human rights with a view to empowering all individuals, in particular those in vulnerable situations.
28. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that increased participation will not be brought about simply as a consequence of progress in information and communication technologies. The growing feeling of political discontent and disaffection among people must be addressed, if such technologies are to facilitate the empowerment and participation of individuals.
The next forum, to be held in Madrid in October 2008, should examine the issue of e-governance and e-democracy.
Just prior to the forum, I was in Florida at IBMs RSDC2007, which I was sad to have to leave already Tuesday morning. But then I got stuck in both Orlando and Newark airports (and learned that Continental Airlines has the worst customer service in the world), so I actually didn’t make it to the forum until Thursday mid-afternoon.
I’ll return to the forum and the RSDC-conference shortly, but want to relate to the travel experience itself first, because it really accentuated one of the points I wanted to make on the forum.
What I wanted was to pick up on Hannah Arendt, who talked about the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse, towards a system that does not listen.
With apologies to Arendt, who talked about far bigger issues than customer service in airports, Continental Airlines certainly didn’t listen, and I and the 5000 other passengers were given no voice whatsoever, and were not only forced to queue up for countless hours and eaten off with a pillow and a $14 voucher, but also lied to and deliberatedly misinformed (interestingly, but off topic, I see that Continental’s website’s flight info system can be used to track flight info further back than the immediate user interface allows, on just have to know a bit of REST (or, URL-design): I can see that the connecting flight I was supposed to be on was delayed less than a hour. They said otherwise.)
Back to Hannah Arendt and the more important stuff. She sees the public sphere as the place where light comes from, namely the light thrown on things when they take place in public. In Men in Dark Times from 1968, she argued that modernity has created a darkening or obscuring of the light from the public sphere, and caused the withdrawal of the general public (citizens) from the public world.
Her critique of modern (as in 20th Century) culture is related to the decline of community, of human solidarity, of plurality. Arendt develops the theme through her analysis of modernity’s collapse of worldliness and the accompanying erosion of individual and collective memory. Modernity, she says, is freedom from politics rather than freedom to take part and make praxis; Homo Faber instead of Vita Activa.
For Arendt, political freedom is “the right to be a participator in government”, and “no one could be called either happy or free without participating, and having a share, in public power”, as she wrote in The Human Condition (1958).
The Council of Europe’s press announcement after the Swedish forum fittingly said that the forum “ended with a call for action to counteract a growing apathy among citizens for political participation”.
The challenges we face are manyfold. First, the dominant trend in neoliberalism is that freedom from politics for the many is held as a good thing (that is of course also a foundation for representational democracy in general). Second, when citizens do get their act together and attempt to participate, all “the system” allows for is some sort of pseudoparticipation (Pateman 1970). Third, especially in the view of globalisation and emerging democracies, the exercise of “politics” can be very dangerous to be around. Fourth, we register small pieces from which we reconstruct our perception of the whole and have it make sense. But sense is not necessarily accurate, as Kujala & Weinmann (2005) points out: Just think of the point made in “I’ve had Alzheimer’s as long as I can remember”. Firth, sense “may be in the eye of the beholder, but beholders vote and the majority rules” (Weick, 1995).
A couple of weeks ago, the Danish Prime Minister announced that he and other Cabinet ministers will supervise a group of experts in the making of a democracy canon. It takes only a simple exercise of political canonicalization (c14n) to realise that the group is heavy on people of neoliberal observations, and very light on other observations, so I suppose people like Arendt are ruled out of being canonised.
In my talk at the CoE forum, my main message was that there is no such thing as eDemocracy, only democracy. Similar to what we’ve been saying about eGovernment for a while, the “e” is becoming more and more useless, not because we don’t digitise, but because digitalisation is the norm, the way we do business, or at least a very integral part of the overall government transformation.
On the “e” in eDemocracy, I returned to Coleman’s and mine Bowling Together (2001) and noted that I did see some new developments occuring, but also that the main recommendations are very valid still today, IMHO.
To signify that what we talk about today is not just Plain Old Democracy, some call it “Democracy 2.0”, that is, a “next-generation” democracy. In fact one where democracy meets Web 2.0: With Tim O’Reilly’s The Architecture of Participation, and Mitch Kapor’s Architecture is Politics (and Politics is Architecture). With Cluetrain Manifesto we learned that markets are conversations, and at RSDC2007, I heard IBMs CTO proclaim that business value and social value go hand in hand, and that SecondLife is an important “public” sphere. I am not geeky enough to call Second Life a new foundation for execution of democracy, but am indeed geeky enough to claim that â€the internet†(well, “the network”) is the new foundation for execution of democracy, but should never be the only platform for usage.
Technolgies such as blogs, wikis, social/P2P networks, mobile devices and probably soon Second Life and all that hold lots of promises for a more participatory, inclusive democracy. But at the same time, these same technologies (“the network”) can be, and is, used in very undemocratic ways, and basically redefines important freedoms and rights, for example in terms of privacy and identity.
Also, there is an increasing amount of critique of Web 2.0, for example Michael Gorman’s (2007) Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters. Also:
“Web 2.0 is a cultural and intellectual catastrophe that will provoke mass media illiteracy in America. The challenge now is political. It’s to build a coalition of people philosophically opposed to the corrosive ideas in Web 2.0. This is a sales and marketing job. We’ve got to reach leaders in education, business, politics, media and the arts who care about the future of our culture. The only way to efficaciously fight back against the radical democratizers is by exposing Web 2.0 to serious public scutiny. People outside Silicon Valley get it when they are exposed to the Web 2.0 nonsense.” Andrew Keen (2007).
In his Old Revolutions Good, New Revolutions Bad: A Response to Gorman, Clay Shirky (2007) picks Gorman’s and Keen’s arguments to pieces. Others do the same.
Over in Sweden, Anders R Olsson raises some critical issues about blogging in two recent articles, Bloggar har inget med demokrati att göra and Bloggarnas makt är bara dumheter. His argument is that blogging undoubtfully has some function for some people, but that that function has nothing to do with societal enlightenment or journalistic quality. Surely, Anders has a point here. Even Gorman has a point.
Yet, they are missing the main point, I think. Blogging and the Web 2.0 trend is serendipitous, ambiguous and heterogeneous. For example, Malene Charlotte Larsen offers 25, no, 35, perspectives on online social networking. And that’s just for youngsters.
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.
I wrote a Danish article in Version2 published yesterday. Here is my translation:
OpenDocument Foudation is very concerned about the development in Denmark. Moreover, the organisation is readying a plugin that will make it even easier to use the ODF-format.
John Gøtze
The awareness of the political initiatives around the usage of open standards reaches beyond Denmark.
“Denmark needs a winning attitude, but this policy is appeasement”, comments Sam Hiser, Director of Business Affairs in OpenDocument Foundation, an organization promoting and supporting ODF.
Sam Hiser is following the international development around ODF closely, and is not pleased with what he hears from Denmark.
“Denmark’s dual format policy is one of the more depressing events in recent months”, he says.
“It sets a precedent for compromise that paints Danish agencies into a corner,” he argues.
Hiser proposes that the Danish policy should above all permit CIOs to do the necessary business process re-engineering to get away from the control of tMicrosoft.
“We’ve always thought our conception of an ODF Plugin for MS Office as being among Microsoft’s worst nightmares. And that it is. Something which goes into Windows XP/Office and permits native file open, edits and save as ODF is going to be very interesting”, Hiser tells about the ODF Foundation’s plugin.
There are other ODF-plugins to Microsoft Office. First, Sun’s Plugin for MS Office, which produces an OpenOffice-equivalent conversion to ODF. Second, the Microsoft/Clever Age/Novell Plugin for Office 2007.
The OpenDocument Foundation calls their ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office “da Vinci”, but is not yet an finished product.
Hiser explains that the da Vinci plugin has two elements the others do not. First, it has a ODF InfoSet API for server-side integration with the ODF Plugin for MS Office. Second, it has a ODF Feature-Set Wizard to help organizations govern the features in their office files.
Hiser explains that the OpenDocument Foundation’s plugin will ensure vendor independence when developing applications that use the document data.
Thanks, Sam!
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.