Daily Archives: Thursday, March 21, 2013

Did you know House of Commons Select Committees only accept submissions in Microsoft’s proprietary formats?

Today in my Twitter feed I read a tweet announcing the deadline for submissions to the Transport Select Committee for a new inquiry on local authority parking enforcement.

Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:

2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.

Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.

For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.

Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.

Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:

Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.

Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.