Adoption of Open Standards in European public 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/political environment friendly to open source and open standards.
Why choose open (document) formats ?
- Accessibility & freedom of choice : ensure everyone can read and write, using their preferred tool ;
- Sustainability : guarantee control over time ;
- 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 for the last few years :
A (very brief) history of document formats
In the beginning...
OK, not that far back
2006 - 2008
Hey look at us, we're an open standard.
Pfft... we can be open, too.
OOXML
De facto standard - Microsoft Office binary format
2008-now
New de facto standard - Microsoft OOXML
Look ma, we're ISO standards!
OOXML strict & transitional
Still around : old Microsoft binary formats
Confused yet?
So what's changed since 2008 ?
Technology
Application support
...
What HASN'T changed since 2008
Administrations still need offline document editing & to ensure long-term sustainability.
ODF is the only standard for offline document editing fully supported by multiple applications, including FOSS.
Why haven't all public administrations 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 clear benefits ;
- Macros and scripts built using Microsoft OOXML ;
- What do you do with legacy documents?
- No good support for ODF on mobile.
So how are administrations addressing all this?
Case study #1 : the UK Cabinet Office
What say you?
Viewing government documents
Sharing or collaborating with government documents
Response
Standard =/= Software
And now for the REAL challenge
CC BY-SA 3.0 Takeaway
Case study #2 : the EU institutions
2010
Theory VS reality
FixMyDocuments.eu
Tentative conclusions
1) Document formats still matter.
2) "Choice of standards" is no real choice.
3) A policy is only as good as its implementation.
4) Software =/= Standard.
