Adoption of Open Standards in European public administrations The Case of Document Formats
Adoption of Open Standards by European Public Administrations - The Case of Document Formats
Aug 08, 2015
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Adoption of OpenStandards in Europeanpublic administrations
The Case of Document Formats
A few words about
Created in 2002 ;Not-for-profit, industry, advocacy organisation ;We work with companies, civil society,academia, public administrations ;Primary focus : ensure a legislative/politicalenvironment friendly to open source and openstandards.
Why choose open(document) formats ?
1. Accessibility & freedom of choice : ensure everyonecan read and write, using their preferred tool ;
2. Sustainability : guarantee control over time ;3. Fair competition : allow all companies to provide a
service and pick the best one ; avoid vendor lock-in.
In case you've been living under a rock forthe last few years :
A (very brief) historyof document formats
In the beginning...
OK, not that far back
2006 - 2008Hey look atus, we're an
openstandard.
Pfft... we can beopen, too.
OOXML
De facto standard - Microsoft Office binary format
2008-now
New de facto standard - Microsoft OOXML
Look ma, we'reISO standards!
OOXML strict& transitionalStill around : old Microsoft binary formats
Confused yet?
So what's changedsince 2008 ?
Technology
Application support
...
What HASN'Tchanged since 2008
Administrations still needoffline document editing & to
ensure long-term sustainability.
ODF is the only standard for offlinedocument editing fully supported bymultiple applications, including FOSS.
Why haven't all publicadministrations
switched to ODF?
CC BY NC SA 2.0 Retrogasm CC BY 2.0 Doug Waldron
It's complicated
Power of inertia ;Up-front costs without any immediate clearbenefits ;Macros and scripts built using Microsoft OOXML ;What do you do with legacy documents?No good support for ODF on mobile.
So how areadministrations
addressing all this?
Case study #1 : the UKCabinet Office
What say you?
Viewing government documents
Sharing or collaborating with government documents
Response
Standard =/= Software
And now for theREAL challenge
CC BY-SA 3.0 Takeaway
Case study #2 : theEU institutions
2010
Theory VS reality
FixMyDocuments.eu
Tentative conclusions
1) Document formats stillmatter.
2) "Choice of standards" isno real choice.
See 'To Select or Not? Dealing with Competing Standardsin Public IT Procurement', Dr. Tineke M. Egyedi, 2012
3) A policy is only as goodas its implementation.
4) Software =/= Standard.
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