open standards - Page number 4

Last week, India became another major country to join the growing, global open standards movement. After three years of intense debate and discussion, India's Department of IT in India finalized its Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, joining the ranks of emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa and others. » Read more

Professionally and personally, we are an increasingly digital culture. The physical distribution channels for information, data, news, stories, and conversation we learned from as young minds are waning in popularity. Books, TV, tapes, CDs, radio, newspapers, and magazines are in decline as the music, entertainment, business information, personal conversations, and current events we demand get delivered to us in an inbox, feed, app, or social network.
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Co-author: Bascha Harris

What if you woke up one day, and every file on your computer in a particular format—say all your word processing documents, or all your photographs—no longer worked?

Not that big of a deal, right? Just a few photos or files.

But what if you're a photographer and it's your business that's now vanished? » Read more

For decades, first responders have dealt with a lack of interoperable communications products. The 9/11 Commission Report¹ and the Katrina Report² both concluded that the absence of interoperable communications among public safety organizations at the local, state, and federal levels was a serious problem and hindrance to emergency response during two of the nation’s worst disasters. » Read more

Last post, I discussed how governments, especially state and local, should be thinking differently about the ways they engage online with the people they serve. » Read more

Think about a public space. Maybe it’s a park, or a public library, but some physical space owned by government. We have different expectations about public spaces, and our freedoms in them, compared to private spaces.

Think about a place where civic happenings go on, where dialogue and delivery of services occur. What comes to mind for me is the (maybe nostalgic) notion of a bustling city hall. People go there to interact with government and each other, and accomplish something. In theory, at least.

Now, imagine this public space is virtual. » Read more

This week I finally got a chance to sit down and digest IBM's latest Global CEO Study, newly published last month and entitled Capitalizing on Complexity. This marks the fourth study IBM has done (they complete them once every two years), and I've personally found them to be really useful for getting out of the weeds and looking at the big picture. » Read more

Creative Commons is helping to shed some light on open education resources in a recent interview with Lisa Petrides from the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME): Open Education and Policy. The good news, there is a lot of policy change at all levels of education. The challenge is » Read more

Graham Taylor of OpenForum Europe (OFE) and  Karsten Gerloff of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) cite standardization policy as the principal battleground for free software & open source communities in Europe.  As Taylor observes, “We [OFE] identified that 90% of the public sector had lost their choice about freely choosing the next step [of software procurement], using all proprietary technologies.”   » Read more

Dr. John D. Halamka, is Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a practicing emergency physician, and holds several other positions, which are listed on his profile at his Geek Doctor blog. According to Halamka, his datacenter “holds a couple of petabytes of healthcare data for 3 million patients, and the entire infrastructure is run on Red Hat technologies. So I have multiple datacenters, multiple clusters of Linux servers, and we haven't had downtime in a couple of years. » Read more