The Route 128 Area of Massachusetts is one of the major centers of technology innovation in the US, receiving (as just one indicator) the second largest amount of venture capital of any area in the U.S. every quarter since such statistics have been kept. It is also the headquarters of more standards consortia than any other state, with such notable organizations as the W3C, OASIS, WS-I, OMG, Open Geospatial Consortium, among many others calling the Baystate home. And yet the word "standards" is almost unknown in the programming of the local trade associations, and many high tech entrepreneurs, VCs and journalists are far less aware of the importance of standards, IMHO, than they should be. But then again, I would say that, wouldn't I?
Be that as it may, a notable exception to the absence of standards programming in the local landscape will occur on May 2 from 8 - 11, when I'll be moderating and presenting at a program hosted by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, the State's largest technology trade association. The title of the program is "Evolving Technology Standards," and the venue will be PTC's facility at 140 Kendrick Street in Needham. The other presenters will be:
- Doug Johnson, Sun Microsystems Corporate Standards
- Ted Morgen, President, Skyhook Wireless
- Peter Roden, Acting Director of Technology, OASIS
If you're interested in attending at a reduced rate, read on.
Like many that have followed the OpenDocument Format (ODF) story in Massachusetts, I've wondered what former State CIO Peter Quinn would eventually decide to do after announcing his resignation late last year. Since then, he's engaged in a whirlwind public speaking tour that has taken him throughout Europe and as far away as Australia. While doing so, he's told the story of what befell him in Massachusetts, and promoted open standards and open source software.
While catching up on my Google Alerts just now, I finally stumbled on the answer in the closing paragraphs of a long article at InformationWeek.com. That article was called Lightning Rod no Longer, and focused on corporate ethics, using Peter as an example of someone who didn't take favors from vendors, but got pilloried anyway. In it, Peter describes in detail how increasing attention (welcome and otherwise) focused on Massachusetts, and how he became in increasing demand as a speaker on the importance of open standards and open source software in government. As a result, his speaking invitations became more numerous, eventually providing a spurious opening for his integrity to be questioned.
According to this article, Peter is returning to the private sector, not surprisingly having had enough of government service, at least for now.
As you may recall, a new organization called the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3 of this year to support the uptake of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) by governments. It's formation was in large part intended to make the adoption of ODF less difficult for future states (and less dangerous for state CIOs) than it had been for Massachusetts last year. Yesterday, the ODF Alliance issued a press release announcing that it has more than tripled its membership to 138, and has also appointed a Managing Director.
As I reported one month ago today when I decided to look in on the Alliance a few weeks after its launch, this highly targeted initiative got off to a very rapid start. It appears that the pace of recruitment has slowed (membership leaped from 38 to 113 in the first two and a half weeks, while an additional 25 members have joined in the past month), but I expect that the rate of recruitment may pick up again with the addtion of the new Managing Director, Marino Marcich.
Late last week, Louis Gutierrez gave his first interview since becoming Massachusetts State CIO. The lengthy list of questions was posed by Computerworld's Carol Sliwa, and represents the first status report on the implementation of OpenDocument Format (ODF) since the resignation of Peter Quinn at the end of last year. In the interview, Gutierrez expands on the themes that he introduced in his first public presentation, given on March 15 at a meeting of the Massachusetts Government Information Systems Association (MGISA) at which I moderated and also presented. Those themes include patience, deliberation, a refusal to engage in turf battles, a focus on getting the job done, and a refreshing inclination for straight talk.
It may be no surprise that the new CIO would bring a careful and non-confrontational style to the current challenge. He was, after all, the first CIO of the state's Information Technology Division (ITD), and returns to that post from another state appointment - as CIO of the executive office of Health and Human Services, where he implemented significant IT initiatives. Unlike his predecessor, he therefore brings a preexisting and extensive knowledge of how things are done (and best not done) on Beacon Hill. He's not looking to fight any battles other than those that must be fought, and has no intention of butting heads to no purpose.
Last summer, IBM set up Power,org, to promote its PowerPC chip as what it called "open hardware." This year, Sun launched the OpenSPARC.net open source project around the source code for its Niagera microprocessor. But what does "open" mean in the context of hardware? In the case of Power.org, Juan-Antonio Carballo said, "It includes but is not limited to open source, where specifications or source code are freely available and can be modified by a community of users. It could also mean that the hardware details can be viewed, but not modified. And it does not necessarily mean that open hardware, or designs that contain it, are free of charge."
True to that statement, you have to pay to participate meaningfully in Power.org, as well as pay royalties to implement - it's built on a traditional RAND consortium model. To use the Sun code, though, its just download the code under an open source license, and you're good to go to use anything except the SPARC name. All of which leads to the questions: "What does "open" mean in hardware, and which approach will work?"
Lately I've been writing quite a bit about "standards wars," frequently using the wireless space as an apt example of behavior that sometimes smacks of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) strategies of the Cold War. A few days ago, the example got even apter with the announcement by Motorola spinoff and silicon vendor Freescale that it was splintering off of the splinter group that it had splintered off of the IEEE working group that then failed to set a UWB standard. Got that? If not, don't worry - it doesn't really make much sense anyway.
The underlying facts are as follows: one of the many wireless working groups within the IEEE was trying to develop a high speed, short range, low frequency standard to cut down on domestic cable clutter that otherwise collects around products such as your PC. As with many other standards, the differences between alternative ways of solving that problem make a lot of difference to vendors, but not much to consumers, who just want things to work when they come home and plug them in.
But this is the wonderful world of wireless, where little happens easily these days. And in this case, things are working even worse than usual.
It is perhaps no surprise that Minnesota, a blue state like Massachusetts and heir to the political traditions of the Prairie Populists, should be the situs of a bill to require "open data formats." In spirit, this is a good thing, as it indicates a broadening appeal for open document format standards that, if missing, would be worrisome. But is the bill as submitted an encouraging signal that a bandwagon effect is taking hold, or a step towards standards Babel, and a leap backwards? The question is a serious one for a variety of reasons, and cuts to the heart of why standards exist.
Clearly, the definition of an "open standard" contained in the Minnesota bill includes many of the attributes that make a standard useful, such as requirements intended to prevent "lock-in" by a single proprietary vendor. But inherent in the concept of a standard is wide acceptance - and if everyone comes up with their own definition of what an "open standard" means, then there is no "standard" for what a "standard" is. If that happens, then the whole economic basis for standardization collapses, because the incentive for a vendor to support a standard is to reach and sell to a large potential customer base with a single, uniform product. Unless each customer specifies the same standards requirements, then the vendor can expect no return on its investment. Moreover, the citizenry suffers as well, because the software that someone needs to exchange a document with her state congressman in St. Paul may not be what's required to communicate with her senator in Washington.
On January 25 of this year, I wrote a blog entry called The State of Play on ODF in Massachusetts: Milestones, Due Dates and Status. In that entry, I identified six milestones to watch for to determine whether adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) was on track in Massachusetts. Since then there has been progress in each of these areas, meaning that it's about time for an update. At the same time, new milestones to watch for have emerged, which I will identify at the end of this entry.
So here we go, with the indented portions below comprising excerpts from the earlier blog entry.
1. Morrissey Amendment: On November 2, 2005, word reached the public that amendment an to an economic stimulus bill had been introduced by Senator Michael Morrissey in the Massachusetts Senate that would radically shift policy making power away from the ITD to a political task force. The text of that amendment was later modified somewhat, but the bill was not enacted into law before the legislature adjourned for the holidays….
I received an email yesterday pointing me to a bill, introduced on March 27, that would require all Executive branch agencies in the state of Minnesota to "use open standards in situations where the other requirements of a project do not make it technically impossible to do this." The text of the bill is focused specifically on "open data formats," and would amend the existing statute that establishes the authority of the Office of Enterprise Technology (OET), and the duties of the states Chief Information Officer. While the amendment does not refer to open source software, the definition of "open standards" that it contains would be conducive to open source implementations of open standards. The text of the affected sections of Minnesota Statutes Chapter 16E, showing the amendments proposed, can be found here.
The fact that such a bill has been introduced is significant in a number of respects. First, the debate over open formats will now be ongoing in two U.S. states rather than one. Second, if the bill is successful, the Minnesota CIO will be required to enforce a law requiring the use of open formats, rather than be forced to justify his or her authority to do so. Third, the size of the market share that can be won (or lost) depending upon a vendor's compliance with open standards will increase. And finally, if two states successfully adopt and implement open data format policies, other states will be more inclined to follow.
Last week I reported on the decision by the City of Bristol, England, to convert its 5,500 desktops from Microsoft Office to Sun Microsystems' StarOffice 8.0, which supports OpenDocument Format (ODF). In the process of making its decision, the City Council of Bristol performed a detailed analysis of total costs of ownership, and posted what it learned on a public Website, providing a useful case study for other govenment entities that might wish to go in the same direction. Today, I'll describe another case study in process: the decision by the National Archives of Australia (NAA) to move its digital archives program to software that supports ODF. The significance of this example is that the NAA gathers in materials from many sources, in many different formats, which will need to be converted to ODF compliance for long term archival storage. It will be instructive to follow the NAA's experience to learn how easy (or difficult) this mode of operation proves to be
Each of these case studies provides an essential dimension that was absent in the move by the Massachusetts ITD to adopt ODF. In the ITD's case, the motivation was primarily towards efficiency and document accessibility and against lock-in. As a result, to use a legal analogy, the Massachusetts example "stands for" the proposition that governments should make use of ODF a priority for long-term accessibility reasons. The Bristol example, in contrast, "stands for" the principle that a government should consider ODF compliant office productivity software for economic reasons. Unlike Massachusetts or the City of Bristol, the NAA will deal almost exclusively with documents created elsewhere. As a result, it provides a "worst possible case" to test whether operating an ODF environment in a world that uses mulitple formats (many of which do not support ODF) is practical. If successful, the NAA example would therefore "stand for" the fact that the use of ODF is reasonable and feasible regardless of the amount of document exchange the adopter must manage with the outside world.