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.
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.