My delay in writing about the Massachusetts Open Document debacle has given time for the irrelevant brouhaha over compliance with travel rules by the head of the Massachusetts Information Technology Division, Peter Quinn, to blow over. Andy Oram at O'Reilly and Pamela Jones at Groklaw did a great job at explaining how Quinn came under excessive scrutiny as "punishment" for following the lead of a growing number of foreign governments and pushing public sector adoption of open standards, specifically the Open Document standard by the State of Massachusetts. Quinn's unfair excoriation followed on the heels of the drubbing his GC, Linda Hamel, took in the legislative hearings. The one upside to the front-page news about Quinn is that it brought some attention to one of the most important and under-reported stories this fall.
The policy requires that state agencies maintain their documents in the OpenDocument format, a publicly accessible standard to which any software company, whether open or closed source, can conform. This not only provides that citizens do not need one particular, proprietary piece of software to read public documents, it also promotes competition in software and opens up the marketplace for more vendors to participate. It diversifies the types of technology in use which, comments security expert Dan Geer, increases the security and safety of the public record.
Brian Robinson, one of the student bloggers on the Cairns blog, writes: "Massachusetts’ Enterprise Information Technology Acquisition Policy mandates that information technology solutions are to be selected based on best value after careful consideration of all possible alternatives including proprietary, public sector code sharing, and open source solutions...This portion of the policy suggests that Massachusetts favors, at a minimum, the consideration of open source software and also requires that IT solutions that may not be well-advertised or recognized be researched and evaluated in the procurement process." While open source software is not mandated, IT solutions must comply with open standards. "The underlying basis behind this policy is to ensure that the Commonwealth’s investments in IT result in systems that are sufficiently interoperable to meet the business requirements of its agencies and to effectively serve its constituencies."
The state's FAQ provides additional information about the project. As Linda Hamel, GC of the Mass Information Technology Division explains in her presentation, an open standard is one where:
"Specifications for systems that are publicly available and are developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an example of an open standard. Open standards imply that multiple vendors can compete directly based on the features and performance of their products. It also implies that the existing information technology solution is portable and that it can be removed and replaced with that of another vendor with minimal effort and without major interruption."
I cannot stress enough how important this issue of open standards is for (e-)democracy and the health and strength of our political culture in an online age. Frankly, I'm dismayed by the lack of attention this issue has received among mainstream IP and cyberlaw academics who have either failed to follow the story or failed to appreciate the open standards are what made the Web possible and are what will make a robust, on-line democracy possible.
Without open standards, there are no publication guidelines to which e-government websites must conform. There is no interoperability, no common formats, no guaranteed accessibility. Without open standards, we will continue to see unuseable, unnavigable government websites that, while putting information online, make it no more accessible to the public that owns it. Without open standards, it becomes very difficult for citizens to "scrape" this public information and make it more useful, more visible, more intelligible. We're not even talking here about open source and making the code accessible. We're simply talking about common and open formats around which different vendors can design and the creation of which can be collaboratively developed by citizens themselves.
Open standards represent an important opportunity, not only to create more accessible public information, but to galvanize the public in the development of the standard, bringing the diverse community affected by such standards into deliberative conversation. We need government officials, technologists, citizens and others involved in the design and articulation of these standards. The Open Document Standard, for example, touches on so many people, including the life and work of legal professionals, judges and courts, administrative experts, and all those citizens interested in access to public information. It was therefore open for public discussion, providing an opportunity for a much wider array of voices beyond just those of technologists to be heard in designing this all-important rule that centrally impacts access to public sector information.
By articulating standards, government can ensure that the technologies designed by the public sector are designed for democracy and not for commerce. As another student of mine, Jeremy Nash, points out, the municipal customer assistance help line for New York City, 311, was designed by a commercial consulting company as a CRM system without regard to the special needs of citizens in a democracy as distinct from customers in a company. Standards ensure that the needs of citizens are met by the private sector provisioning solutions. Opening up these standards makes it, not only possible but necessary, for technology companies to deliver solutions that harness the best the private sector has to offer to the needs and goals of democracy.
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