Status-Q

In a little over a year from now, all official documents in the State of Massachusetts are to be in the standard OpenDocument format, supported by the latest versions of OpenOffice, KOffice, IBM Workplace, Abiword, and others.

This is great, and I’m hoping it will be the first of many such announcements. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for the IEE Review called “If You Love Your Data, Set It Free” (PDF) about the dangers of not using open standards for your data, and just a couple of months ago I applauded Microsoft for using open XML-based formats as the default for the next version of Office, though it turns out that these are not quite as ‘open’ as we might have hoped.

But in “Why OpenDocument Won (and Microsoft Office Open XML Didn’t)“, David A Wheeler makes some important points that should be interesting reading for anyone able to choose their own document formats, and required reading for anyone choosing them on behalf of others. Some excerpts:

In many ways this decision was fairly obvious. OpenDocument appears, at this point, to be the way to go, with no realistic alternative, for any government….

Massachusetts’ Kriss emphasized that Massachusetts is not moving to open standards for economic reasons, but to protect the right of the public to open and free access to public documents, permanently. “What we’ve backed away from at this point is the use of a proprietar standard and we want standards that are published and free of legal encumbrances, and we don’t want two standards.”…

Not everyone is made of money. Governments have to interact with people who have little money, and governments are often strapped themselves. For OpenDocument, this is a no-brainer. Some OpenDocument implementations are available at no cost (particularly OpenOffice.org and KDE KOffice) and have a licensing structure that allows that to continue that way indefinitely. And these are good programs, not poor quality demos…

There’s no doubt that this will cost money. Any transition — even a minor transition to a new version of the same product — costs money. But these are one-time costs, whereas staying where they are will cause more data loss, and by telling everyone now where they are going they can get everyone moving in the same direction (with more lead time, the risks and costs go down)…

The old Microsoft Office format is unspecified and will cause continuing data loss, and it fails to take advantage of XML technology. Even Microsoft is abandoning it. Microsoft’s XML format will prevent instead of help interoperability; it simply fails to meet typical government requirements, since its restrictive license prevents real competition and it failed to enter the standardization process (as requested by Europe and others).

Where governments go, those who work with or for governments often have to follow. But it’s for their own good.

This Privacy-Enhanced Computer Display is a nice idea from Mitsubishi. It’s 4 years old, and it’s not clear it ever progressed beyond being an idea.

Thanks to Tom for the link. Oh, and talking of Tom, I found this post pretty memorable reading.

One of the projects I’m currently working on is Exbiblio. For some time now, the web site has been somewhat vague about what it is we’re actually doing, though it described our general area – making paper more interactive. But over the next few weeks, we plan to release rather more information, and it’s started with the publishing of a whitepaper called ‘The Paper Renaissance’, which you can find at the bottom of this page.

Watch this space…

I know Einstein had a stab at this, but I’m starting to make my own deductions about the non-linearity of space-time. It turns out that walking distance, for example, is dependent on the nature of the environment in which you’re walking.

Strap a rucksack and some walking boots on me, and point me at the open road, and I’ll happily walk fifteen miles. Put me in an art museum, on the other hand, and, though I’ll enjoy the experience almost as much, I’ll want to sit down after a few rooms. Thus we can deduce that Museum Miles are longer than Hiking Miles.

On Saturday I was at IBC – the huge International Broadcasting Convention – at the RAI convention centre in Amsterdam. It was interesting, but I came away absolutely exhausted. Which reminded me of a fact I’d long forgotten: that Trade Show Miles are the longest of all.

Apparently there are now 1.5 Billion people using GSM. Wow.

I’m at Our Social World, an interesting conference about blogging and other forms of social networking which also is conveniently within cycling distance of my home.

We were all encouraged to bring laptops and we’re all, of course, being very ‘social’ – IMing each other, posting entries like this, and so forth. It’s bizarre to see posts popping up in my RSS feeds from people just the other side of the room. It’s fun, if you’re at a conference, to type its name in quotes into Technorati. The challenge here is to get the balance between being electronically social and just chatting to the person next to you.