Number 10 Goes to Digistan
Well, not exactly, but that's we were asking for in an e-petition:
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to adopt the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation.”
Details of Petition:
“We call on the UK government to: (1) Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards; (2) Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards; (3) Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities. as adopted and proclaimed by the founders of the Digital Standards Organization in The Hague on 21 May 2008.”
And this is what that nice Mr Brown replied:The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through its eGovernment Interoperability Framework Version 6.0, 30th April 2004 (eGIF) and through the publication of its Open Source Software Policy which is available in the document “Open Source Software, Use within UK Government, Version 2.0, 28 October 2004”.
This and eGIF are available from www.govtalk.gov.uk. Where possible the Government only uses products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
So there you go.
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4 comments:
No criticism of this, Glyn?
I had a go at it:
http://boycottnovell.com/2008/08/19/digital-standards-organisation-uk/
Good for you.
Frankly, I don't expect anything better from the e-mandarins that run this: they clearly have a real hoot coming up with snarky replies that seem relevant, but aren't....
They may have a policy but they need to be held to account for its results. As the Grauniad said today:
"At the last count, the Treasury that Mr Brown ran did less than 1% of its operations with open source."
"No wonder David Cameron called the prime minister an analogue politician in a digital age."
Absolutely. And it was heartening to see the Guardian give this issue such a good billing. Probably the only hope is that Labour won't want the Tories to get all the brownies points here...
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