Tue, 13/11/2007 - 12:40 — peterv

Last week, I attended the 2nd Free Sofware in the Public Administration Meeting (ESLAP 2007) in Lisbon (Portugal). The first day and the morning of the second day where an "open" meeting, where I presented the Belgian ODF story, using the excellent presentation created for Berlin by my director, Peter Strickx. A Portugese journalist picked up the story [English translation below].

The afternoon, we had a "closed" meeting with about 40 people representing most of the public administrations in Portugal and a few members of parliament (from the web site: "Convidados: FEDICT, Junta de Andalucia, UMIC, AMA, UCMA, CNEL/Plano Tecnológico, Secretarias-Gerais e Institutos de Informática dos Ministérios, Grupos Parlamentares, Gabinete do Primeiro-Ministro"). I gave a short version of the Belgian presentation, after which a lively discussion erupted. Also vendors of proprietary and open source software solutions where present (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, local players, ...) so the debate was balanced since all sides got a chance to defend their viewpoints.

The primary question addressed to me was about how at the Belgian federal level, we where able to reach this "consensus" on enforcing open standards, agreed to by all ICT managers and presidents of the federal public administrations and by the federal government. Key elements are:

  • use a bottom-up approach to reach consensus (including consultation with industry)
  • enforce open standards (but leave decisions on implementation to the local decision makers, e.g. on proprietary vs. open source software)
  • foresee enough time for the process (a number of years)

After presenting on Open Standards in Barcelona, Berlin, Den Haag and Lisbon, we finally end up closer to home in Ghent for the kick-off meeting in Flanders of the OpenDoc Society, tomorrow 14 November 2007, at 18:00 in "de Boekentoren" in Ghent.

[English translation of the Portugese press coverage] :

The adoption of the Open Document Format in Belgium was described by Peter Vandenabeele, from FEDICT, the eGovernment Agency in that country, in the last open session of the 2nd Free Sofware in the Public Administration Meeting. (http://slap2007.softwarelivre.gov.pt/)
Describing the specific conditions at the government level in Belgium, where information exchange between several entities is needed, Peter Vandenabeele stressed the importance of interoperability as a way of establishing the communication between the federal, regional and local administrations.
Pointing to the cost reduction brought by open standards, the speaker mentioned that "more and more administration make a double installation of MS Office and OpenOffice". "To promote the interoperability, to focus on the format and not on the products, to have a pragmatic approach and time to implement as critical success factors" were also mentioned as targets. Peter Vandenabeele also said that he believed that the "the next format war will happen at the level of the collaborative environment".