Today is Document Freedom Day 2010

Not to be confused with tomorrow, April Fools’ Day, today, 31st March 2010 is Document Freedom Day – that time of year when those of us in the open source movement highlight the use of open standards for documents, that lifeblood of any organisation.

One thought that strikes me when thinking about open formats is the sheet insanity of using closed proprietary records for keeping public records; what will future historians think of us, the generation that was bamboozled into using closed proprietary formats for society’s most important records, particularly when those historians are unable to access such records? (Most likely that we were dumb. Ed.).

So, given that today is Document Freedom Day, do the following for the future of your organisation and society in general:

• Install and start using an office suite (e.g. the cross-platform OpenOffice.org) that supports the Open Document Format;
• Start using Open Document Format (an ISO standard no less! Ed.) for your internal and external document exchanges and – if someone outside your organisation doesn’t know what to do with your ODF document – you’ve now got a perfect opportunity to point out how it differs from closed, proprietary formats that can be changed or be made redundant at whim).

Looking around locally, your correspondent was particularly pleased to learn last week at Green, Open and Social (news passim) from Paul Arrigoni, Senior Director of ICT at Bristol City Council, that BCC uses ODF as the standard for its internal exchange of documents, just like Bristol Wireless. Are there any other local organisations using ODF as standard. You can let the world/dog know by commenting below.

More information on Document Freedom Day can be found on the Document Freedom Day website, whilst development can be followed on Twitter with the #DFD2010 hashtag.