open standards

<webwereld column>

A MP stumbles, coughing, into the doctor's surgery. There is blood pouring from the ears and nose and left eye. “Doctor, doctor, I've just had a bad fall and I think I've broken my wrist” gasps the MP. The doctor has a look and briefly feels the pulse. “Does that hurt?” “A little bit” mumbles the MP. “I don't think it's that bad” says the doctor. Unfortunately I can't check it today as the digital X-ray machine is broken”. The MP is swaying back and forth. “It's probably just a bruise, the nurse will give you a sling. Take it easy for a couple of days and come back if it's still painful.”  The MP staggers out of the surgery, still bleeding from the ears, nose and eye. The doctor is already focused on the file of the next patient, because doctors are very busy.

The process described above resembles the way the Court of Audit went about answering MPs questions about our national IT strategy. The MPs asking those questions were not experts and the Court provided simplistic answers without providing any context or stopping to consider whether the symptoms might be part of a broader problem. The newly-published report failed to respond  even to the superficial questions and, moreover, based its answers on minimal data.  Which is a disgrace, as it is precisely the role of the Court to delve into the deeper issues.

For decades throughout the Western world houses were built with asbestos. The material is affordable, durable, insulating and also has excellent fire resistant properties. All this - and the low price – made it the ideal stuff to use for everything. Which is what we did.

As long as the asbestos remains safely in place, nothing much happens. It does its job and you don't need to think about it. The problems begin when changes are made, such as a conversion. The demolition of a such a wall releases microscopic asbestos fibres, resulting in enormous danger to the health of anyone who has the misfortune to be nearby. Consequently the processing of asbestos is very strictly regulated. Despite these regulations, asbestos has for decades caused twice as many deaths as road accidents.

Because the long-term consequences of the use of asbestos is so damaging, its use is now prohibited. All this, despite the fact that the original reasons for using still exist: asbestos is still cheap, strong, durable, insulating and fire resistant. Yet we now don't use it because the social price is just too high. Strategic and social reasons are more important than practical and technical advantages.

Preamble
The Lower House of the Dutch Parliament has asked the Court of Audit to investigate the problems and opportunities related to the adoption of open standards and open source software for the government's information systems. The Court has invited various experts to give their views. This blog post is my contribution.

The questions are being asked to the highest supervisory body of the country, rather than the departments responsible for implementing this policy - the Ministries of Home Affairs, and also Economic Affairs, Agriculture & Innovation - eight years after the government's first unanimous vote on this issue and the expenditure of about 5 billion euros on licensing fees. The impression given to the outside world is that Parliament is not impressed with the progress of the last eight years and believes that the relevant government departments could benefit from the external scrutiny of a neutral and objective body.

Each of the following five questions implies a series of unspoken assumptions. In order to answer the questions, it is necessary to identify and, where neccesary, challenge these underlying assumptions in order to reach a sensible answer.

In a recent column (Dutch), Frank Benneker of Amsterdam University explored the consequences of the rapidly growing use of cloud computing. The shift of computer applications from PCs and servers to a single "service" provided through a worldwide network is probably as fundamental a shift as the earlier one from mainframe computing to PCs.

Given the objectives of the Dutch Open standards and interoperability policy plan, cloud computing seems the quick and easy-to-implement solution: I hear Web 2.0 enthusiasts say “put everything on Google Docs and we are all interoperable”. But just as in the case of the "liberation" of PCs from mainframe managers/suppliers, there are problems with cloud computing – potential snakes in the grass.

In December 2004 the Dutch government decided that the dependency on dominant software providers was a problem and had to be addressed. The Dutch action plan from 2007 was the first, tentative step in dealing with this.

In a recent speech EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes stated that badly functioning IT markets and high vendor dependence have far-reaching consequences for the functioning of public bodies and companies in Europe. There is much to be gained, both economically and functionally, by focusing on open standards and open source software. 'This is a waste of public funds no government can afford any longer.'

The Dutch IT magazine Computable.nl has a summary of the speech with my comments (original in Dutch - Google translation here). English commentary on the speech here, here and here.

<webwereld column - in Dutch>

Computer viruses and palliatives against them are a growing threat to high-tech care. There is a classic solution for the old problem of a vulnerable mono-culture: diversity.

Last Monday alarm bells went off in many IT departments. A viral infection on Windows XP computers was initially caused by an anti-virus update from McAfee. The update made part of the system appear to be a threat and system file protection software made the system unusable, a type of auto-immune disease.

(Dutch column voor 'digital government')

What is a document? It started as a flat piece of beaten clay, onto which characters were scratched with a stick. 8000 years later it was found and after years of study, archaeologists concluded that it said: 'You owe me three goats”. 



Through papyrus and parchment scrolls we arrived at mass production of paper and book printing in Europe in the 15th century. Our sense of the nature of a document is still derived from this previous revolution in information capture and distribution. When computers became commonplace as a tool to create documents, there was therefore a strong focus on applications to produce paper document as quickly and nicely as possible. The creation had become digital, but the final result was not fundamentally different from the first printed book in 1452.

Had fun doing talk this afternoon at HAR2009. While I was taking a nap afterward someone wrote a very nice review on the HAR wiki.

I re-iterated many of the points I made at the CCC-conference in Berlin. My main points were also written down in english in a recent interview with the Indian Center for Internet & Society.

To spice things up a bit I added a new aspect about areas of public sector IT that should be under ultimate control by public sector organisations. I'm still refining these ideas but this is the gist of it:

Last week I was visiting the Dutch Caribbean by invitation of the local government to do the opening keynote (ODF 1 2) on their conference on open standards and opensource. Curacao, one of the islands of the Dutch Antillies is about to become fully independent nation state and that means a lot of re-design of the local IT systems of the government and public sector. The government is determined to maximise the opportunities offered by open standards and opensource software to move the new governemnt, the local educational system and economy forward. For education an OLPC project is being considered because 3 PCs per school is not the way into the 21st century. Hopefully the new Internet Exchange (based on the Dutch one) will bring down the cost of bandwith so that all those OLPC's will be able to go online.

Conservative party leader David Cameron held a speech at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on April 3rd. Aside from the usual criticism (not all undeserved) at the current government he talked about the network society and bottom-up collaboration enable by ubiquitous access to IT. He (or his staffer) had obviously read "Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win" by William C. Taylor and Polly G. Labarre. And a good thing too since it is filled with good examples of how to innovate by sticking your neck out and doing things differently.

About three quarters through the speech Cameron very explicitly stated that his government, if elected, would actively seek a greater use of opensource software and mandate the use of open standards for public IT systems. According to him this will enable faster innovation in the public sector while avoiding repeats of the very expensive NHS disaster.

There were two elections on my news radar the last two weeks. One in an African country now rapidly sinking into an economic crash and possible civil war, the other in the heart of the civilized west; the OOXML election by ISO standards body in Geneva. Aside from the locations and prices of hotels for journalists the differences were few. Bribery, fraud and intimidation were applied to achieve a specific outcome, never mind what the majority wanted. In the OOXML election even the standards organizations of proper democratic countries like Norway and Germany were unable to withstand the well-oiled lobby machine of the worlds most convicted software monopolist. In the Netherlands Microsoft was actually a member of the committee and prevented a committee consensus. So instead of voting against the standards, as 21 out of 22 members wanted, the Netherlands voted 'abstain'.

There were two elections on my news radar the last two weeks. One in an African country now rapidly sinking into an economic crash and possible civil war, the other in the heart of the civilized west; the OOXML election by ISO standards body in Geneva. Aside from the locations and prices of hotels for journalists the differences were few. Bribery, fraud and intimidation were applied to achieve a specific outcome, never mind what the majority wanted. In the OOXML election even the standards organizations of proper democratic countries like Norway and Germany were unable to withstand the well-oiled lobby machine of the worlds most convicted software monopolist. In the Netherlands Microsoft was actually a member of the committee and prevented a committee consensus. So instead of voting against the standards, as 21 out of 22 members wanted, the Netherlands voted 'abstain'.

The Dutch national government is proceeding with its new implementation of 'GOUD' (Gold), its new plan for a 'standardized desktop' for ministries and other governmental institutions. After the much publicized new Dutch National IT-policy of last autumn this might sound wonderful. It's not.

The problem with the 'standardized desktop' is that it uses very few real standards. Instead it uses products and pretends they are standards. The difference between 'standards' and the idea of 'standards products' is widely misunderstood, often confused and this is where projects such as 'GOUD' go off in troublesome directions.