This year’s Document Freedom Day, which celebrates information accessibility and raises awareness of Open Standards, will take place on Wednesday, 28th March. Here in Bristol Wireless, we’ve been using the Open Document Format (ODF) Open Standard for exchanging documents internally for many years now. We like it since it has many advantages: firstly, there’s the […]
The Cabinet Office has announced a consultation on ‘open standards’ for software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT. This is the second such consultation on open standards: in January ComputerWeekly said it had unearthed evidence that Microsoft and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) had successfully pressurised the UK government into withdrawing its January […]
At the end of last week, both houses of the New Hampshire legislature passed HB418 (2012). This bill is “relative to the use of open source software and open data formats by state agencies and relative to the adoption of a statewide information policy regarding open government data standards.” That means that New Hampshire has […]
To promote the implementation of the National Infrastructure for Open Data (INDA), the Brazilian Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management last week launched the beta version of the Brazilian Open Data Portal. The full version is scheduled for launch in 2012. INDA is a set of standards, technologies, procedures and control instruments for meeting the […]
From the heart of Leipzig in Germany, news reaches the lab of the establishment of Open Source Solar, a place for collaborative development of open source hardware for small photovoltaic systems, with the aim of assisting the construction of the highest quality, affordable solar systems. To quote: Photovoltaic power supplies are very useful if grid […]
Yesterday morning, Bristol Wireless’ chief scribe held a conversation on the Twitter micro-blogging site with an old friend of the co-op, Will Pollard of wifiExeter. The discussion was prompted by a visit to Exeter by Shadow Culture Minister, Dan Jarvis MP and revolved around matters such as the use of Creative Commons and other open/‘copyleft’ […]
European universities and employment agencies are increasingly making use of a Europass Curriculum Vitae, an open standard for creating and managing CVs (that’s a résumé for our readers on the other side of the Atlantic. Ed.), according to OSOR. Also increasingly popular is the European Union’s web service to create such CVs: this year the […]
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organisation whose mission is to lead the Web to its full potential, is holding its first ever developer conference. Entitled W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals, it takes place next week on 15-16 November in Redmond, Washington, USA. For anyone interested in attending, registration is still open. For those […]
Portugal’s Agency for Administrative Modernisation (AMA) is currently asking citizens to comment on several open standards, including document formats PDF, ODF, interoperability standards, plus standards for geographic information systems and electronic invoicing. Comments will be accepted until the end of October. The consultation is part of the country’s open standards law adopted in April. This […]
At Bristol Wireless, we’re keen on comparing and contrasting the hesitant steps (prevarication surely? Ed.) of the British public sector towards open source software with the full-blooded embrace to which the public sector abroad subjects it. This has once again clearly illustrated this week. Courtesy of Guardian Government Computing, we learn that Whitehall’s plans for […]
It’s easy to be critical of Bristol City Council; any long-term resident will vouch for that. However, amongst British local authorities it has been a pioneer for its willingness to dip its toes into the waters of open source, although even here it has not had an easy time (news passim). News emerges today on […]
On Friday your humble correspondent was avoiding doing paid work and discussing online the glacial pace of the UK public sector’s deployment of open source (news passim) with Mark Taylor of Sirius IT and IT journalist and writer Glyn Moody. During the discourse, Mark came up with the term ‘OSS Please!’. Glyn then picked it […]
Last week Mark Turner, CEO of Sirius IT and the lead for the Cabinet Office’s ‘New Suppliers to Government’ Workgroup expressed his frustration with the slow pace of implementing changes to the UK Government’s IT and embracing more open source (allegedly to go along with open standards and open data. Ed.) as follows via Twitter: […]
The Swiss Parliament’s control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication of Open Justitia, a document management system (DMS) developed in-house by the court as open source software, according to OSOR. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon. The parliament’s committee discussed Open Justitia last Thursday following complaints by […]
According to the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI), domestic Romanian and European interoperability requirements are forcing it to ban the use of open source software in building a criminal records management system. The explicit ban of software available under an open source licence is one of the requirements made by the ministry in the […]
OSOR reports that the Brazilian Government signed a letter of intent last month to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the office suites maintained by both communities. The letter states that the Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF) standard is already a guarantee of interoperability within the […]
As previously announced, the second run of the Bristol Wiki Academy took place on Monday this week up at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in Bristol (news passim). We got off to an early(ish) start at 10.30 am with a round of introductions, followed by a brief presentation on Wikipedia’s mission of free knowledge for everyone […]
The UK public sector has been characterised as an impregnable fortress as far as open source software is concerned. While public sector bodies in other countries are adopting open source (news passim), the British public sector is a virtual closed shop for advocates of openness (in terms of software). This dire situation has been further […]
Today the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne MP, is speaking at Google Zeitgeist 2011. As a matter of fact, he’s not just giving any old speech, but the event’s keynote address. HM Treasury has very kindly released the Chancellor’s speech in advance and it does make very interesting reading indeed. Perusing the speech, your […]
Today is Document Freedom Day, an annual event that aims to educate the public about the importance of free document formats and open standards in general. Here in the Bristol Wireless lab, we’ve been telling visitors about why open standards and free document formats are important, such as avoiding the pitfalls of proprietary formats and […]