In Praise of Government Leadership

On Open Enterprise blog.

I Came, ISO, I Didn't Conquer

The OOXML farce continues:

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

...


According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.

ISO Appeal: South Africa Rises to the Challenge

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft's Latest Whizzo Plan: Divide and Conquer

On Open Enterprise blog.

SA Adopts ODF

The club just got larger:

Open Document format (ODF) yesterday became an official standard for South African government communications.

The ODF standard is included in the government's Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) released yesterday.

In the foreword to the document, department of public service and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, says that "this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of open standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO Open Document Format".

(Via tuxmachines.org.)

The Open Rainbow Nation

Big news from South Africa:

The South African Cabinet today announced that it had approved a free and open source strategy and that government would migrate its current software to free and open source software.

At a Cabinet media briefing government said that it had "approved a policy and strategy for the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) in government.

In a statement the cabinet said "all new software developed for or by the government will be based on open standards and government will itself migrate current software to FOSS. This strategy will, among other things, lower administration costs and enhance local IT skills."

"All the major IT vendors in the country have both supported the initiative and made contributions to the development of FOSS. Government departments will incorporate FOSS in their planning henceforth."

Given South Africa's position as the main economic motor of the region, this could have interesting knock-on effects elsewhere in the continent.
(Via Technocrat.)

Second Life and Africa

Here's an interesting point:

Many have observed that the African American economy in the US is probably bigger than even South Africa, a country recognised as the engine of Africa, with 47 million people and yet there is no visible connection between this economy and the rest of Africa for the world to notice.

Imagine everyone of us who are privileged to be connected could use our contacts and share them with our virtual friends in this Second Life and all of us can know each other through other people, how long will it take for us to create a social networking virtual space that we can collectively use to negotiate a better life for us and those connected to us.

One of the paradoxes of Second Life is that for all that it allows people to assume any identity they want, most of these turn out to be Caucasian (with a smattering of furries). As Second Life - or its successor - moves closer to the centre of online activity, the issue of bringing in developing nations and their related identities is one that will become ever more pressing if we are to avoid exacerbating the digital divide.

Open Energy Technology

Here's another example of open source being invoked in the context of helping to solve environmental problems:

Non-patentable shared "open energy technology" has the potential to have a profound impact on the reduction of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, in the same way that open source software has changed computers and the Internet.

There's an interesting twist, in that it also suggests

Possibly the most ideal person to do it would be South African billionaire, Mark Shuttleworth, who is currently taking on Microsoft's domination of the operating system market through the development of the open source operating system, Ubuntu Linux.

The reason being that Shuttleworth is a local boy for the publication in question. A nice idea, despite the nepotism.

Open Business on Open Content

Once more, the indispensable Open Access News takes me somewhere I didn't know I wanted to go. This time it's to a site called Open Business. According to its home page:

OpenBusiness is a platform to share and develop innovative Open Business ideas - entrepreneurial ideas which are built around openness, free services and free access. The two main aims of the project are to build an online resource of innovative business models, ideas and tools, and to publish an OpenBusiness Guidebook.

At the moment it seems to be another tripod, with legs in the UK, Brazil and South Africa. Its basic form is a blog, topped off with a dash of wiki.

The link that brought me here led to an interview with Esther Dyson. I have to confess that I tend to find her a little, er, light, shall we say? But this interview was an exception, and she had some interesting background to give on Del.icio.us, in which she was an angel investor.

I'm still not entirely clear what the site is doing - either strategically or structurally - but it has pointers to stuff I wasn't aware of, so it gets brownie points for that if for nothing else. One to return to.