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

[Troy]

Great idea Tony.  I wish I would have thought of offering the open standard
as a resolution as my caucus too.

As Brian points out, there is the cost of training involved with any
conversion.  However, I think this touches on the fundamental issue of how
we teach people to use software.  This topic was mentioned in another list
that I am a member, and the consensus was we teach kids to use MS Word, not
word processing software.  It would be nice if schools at least touched on
alternatives to MS products.

Troy

On Feb 6, 2008 6:52 AM, Brian D. Ropers-Huilman <brian at ropers-huilman.net>
wrote:

> On Feb 6, 2008 12:26 AM, Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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,
> >
> > 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
>
> I am a strong proponent of open source and have even been accused of
> evangelicalizing at times. I pushed my extended family to move to
> OpenOffice years ago, as I did.
>
> Having said that, however, we need to be careful when we talk about
> costs. There certainly will be a cost involved in such a conversion,
> not in the cost of the format or of the software to produce documents
> in that format, but in terms of training. Like it or not, there are
> differences in the applications that support open formats and those
> that don't and those differences will have to be trained before users
> are fully accepting of the new applications and their new formats.
>
> I just needed to point that one out.
>
> We did not stay for our actual caucus last night as our kids would
> have melted. I'm not aware of any discussion in that regard either,
> but I applaud you for bringing it up and am excited that your
> resolution passed.
>
> --
> Brian D. Ropers-Huilman
>
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>



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