[ubuntu-us-mn] Open standards for government documents

[Tony Yarusso]

As noted on my blog, I attended my caucus tonight, and decided to present a
resolution for mandating the use of ISO-approved open standards for all new
government documents and all being newly converted to electronic form,
mentioning ODF as the current best option but leaving room to consider
others as appropriate in the future.  My precinct easily passed the
resolution, although for many of them it was the first they had heard of the
issue.

I was wondering if anyone else had similar resolutions brought up in their
precinct, and if so, what was the result?  The only concern raised against
mine was wondering what the potential cost would be, although I think we
have a solid argument there in that it would cost essentially nothing to
implement open formats in a forward-only manner, and the real cost only
comes in with retroactively converting existing documents (and the
prioritization of my resolution was worded accordingly), and regardless
would be far less than the cost of trying to recover data after a vendor
went bankrupt, changed its terms, or any other similar drastic blocking
event to current documents.

Given that open document standards have been proposed twice already in the
Minnesota Legislature (but been ignored as a low priority), and enjoyed
increasing success in being passed into law in other states and countries, I
think we have an opportunity to make a significant push for this in
Minnesota in the coming year.  Additionally, the benefits of open formats
provide a great starting point for selling the benefits of open source
software in government usage as well (state agencies, legislators, ***public
schools!***, etc.), which is another thing that I would very much like to
see us get involved in in the coming months and years.

So, I wanted to take the opportunity of this local caucus night to see where
other people around the state were at with respect to standardized, free,
open, non-proprietary formats in government office documents, and start
getting people talking about how we might go about making a significant
publicity push on the issue with the common population as well as gathering
support from local and state representatives.  Let the ideas flow!

-- 
Tony Yarusso
http://tonyyarusso.com/
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