Daily Archives: Friday, February 27, 2015

  • Bristol City Council asked about open standards

    Steve WoodsBristol, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

    BCC logoWhenever I make a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to Bristol City Council, the response invariably comes back in a proprietary Microsoft Office format (e.g. .docx, .xlsx, etc.), a practice I find less than satisfactory – not to say galling – as an advocate of free and open source software and open standards.

    That being so, the following FoI request has been made today to the council:

    Dear Bristol City Council,

    This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.

    In July 2014, the Cabinet Office announced the adoption of open standards for document viewing and collaboration in central government. See https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs for details.

    The standards adopted are:

    – PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents;
    – Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents.

    What plans does Bristol City Council have to emulate central government’s move and when will similar open standards be adopted by the council for communicating and collaborating with citizens.

    Yours faithfully,

    Steve Woods

    Hopefully an answer will be forthcoming by Document Freedom Day 2015 (posts passim).

  • DFD2015 is 25th March

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

    Document Freedom Day is an international day celebrating open standards and happens every year on the last Wednesday of March. This year it will take place on 25th March.

    It is a day to come together and raise attention towards the ever growing importance of Open Standards for all aspects of our digital communication and information accessibility.

    With the rise of new technologies and hardware, more and more communication is transmitted via electronic data. At the same time, more and more information is provided in digital formats or even created in digital format and will never be transferred to any analogue media. Various companies try to exploit these factors by offering communication or information services that use proprietary data formats to lock users into their software, hardware and services, so-called vendor lock-in.

    Celebrating Document Freedom Day is part of the fight against proprietary standards and vendor lock-in and a great opportunity to promote open standards, such as Open Document Format.

    Open standards are formats and protocols which everybody can use free of charge and restriction. They come with compatibility “built-in” – the way they work is shared publicly and any organisation can use them in their products and services without asking for permission. Open standards are the basis of cooperation and modern society: train tracks, power sockets and natural language are all examples of specifications that we all rely on and take for granted in daily life.

    DFD 2015 flyer

    In the past year there’s been a great boost to open standards in the United Kingdom with central government’s adoption of open standards for viewing or collaborating on government documents (posts passim).

    Now that Whitehall has adopted open standards, it’ll probably be a long battle to get local government to do likewise.

    For more information on Document Freedom Day 2015, visit Document Freedom.