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At 12:26 AM 2/6/2008, Tony Yarusso announced he had
introduced:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">a resolution for
mandating the use of ISO-approved open standards for all new
government documents and all being newly converted to electronic
form, mentioning ODF as the current best option but leaving room
to consider others as appropriate in the
future.</blockquote><br>
I don't wish to ignite a political flamewar, nor to push my
favored presidential candidate on a captive audience, but at least
one presidential candidate has staked out a position in this area
(or adjacent to it).<br><br>
In a
<a href="http://lessig.org/blog/2007/11/4barack.html">blog</a><a href="http://lessig.org/blog/2007/11/4barack.html">
post</a> endorsing Obama, Lawrence Lessig refers to Obama's <a href="http://lessig.org/blog/Fact%20Sheet%20Innovation%20and%20Technology%20Plan%20FINAL.pdf">technology</a><a href="http://lessig.org/blog/Fact%20Sheet%20Innovation%20and%20Technology%20Plan%20FINAL.pdf"> plan</a>:
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<dd>As you'll read, Obama has committed himself to a technology policy for government that could radically change how government works. The small part of that is simple efficiency -- the appointment with broad power of a CTO for the government, making the insanely backwards technology systems of government actually work. <br>
<dd>But the big part of this is a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/">Sunlights</a> and the <a href="http://maplight.org/">Maplights</a> of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.
</dl>"Standards" aren't necessarily "open standards", of course, and Obama's high-concept whitepaper doesn't get into the devil-friendly weeds. Still, open standards are surely in keeping with his declared intent to "open up the federal government, creating a new level of transparency". You might want to submit your resolution to the Obama campaign via their website. Or poke around the Sunlight and Maplight websites to see what, if anything, those watchdog organizations are doing to promote open document standards.</body>
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