This year on March 31, along with more than 200 groups in 60 countries, we will observe the third Document Freedom Day. This grassroots effort aims to educate the public about the importance of open formats and open standards.
We've entered a time in which we store far more digitally than we do on paper. Our descendants will have to seek their history--government records, birth and death certificates, financial and property transactions--through the previous generation's digital formats.
It's not hard to put yourself in their shoes. Just think of all the things you've lost or had to convert or replace because of obsolete formats. Your 8-track and laserdisc collections. The 8 mm home movies. Every document you wrote in the late '90s, stored on Zip disks.
But what if you couldn't just call a conversion service? What happens when a file format is no longer supported by the company that owned it? Document freedom is vital to our future by ensuring that:
- Everything we create today is still available tomorrow.
- We're able to freely collaborate with others, regardless of their software.
- We can interact with our governments, and that they can interact with each other.
We've already begun talking about Document Freedom Day on opensource.com, and we'll continue to do so over the next week. In the meantime, why don't you find your way to participate? Getting involved can be as simple as a tweet with the #dfd2010 hashtag to spread the word.
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