A report, titled
Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems , put together by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society after discussions with top federal officials from 13 countries, has urged nations to adopt open-information technology standards for better economic growth and greater efficiency.
The report, which was submitted to the World Bank in a meeting in New York on Friday, takes into consideration the recommendations of officials from Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Jordan, Thailand and several other countries.
“Almost by necessity, a new openness, fueled by a wave of information and communication technologies (ICT), is evolving and unlocking the efficiencies, standardization and flexibility needed to propel the transformation of governments and businesses,” said the report.
“Japan is revising its laws to dictate that where open standards exist they will be given priority in government procurements. Denmark has achieved remarkable cost-savings through the government's use of an open standard. And in India, the government has been collaborating with business to promote innovative services within the entrepreneur community based on open architectures. Open standards bind together open ICT ecosystems and drive interoperability,” it added.
The recommendations follow a February meeting between the officials of different countries and subsequent interactive sessions between them. The report defines an open standard technology as one that is openly published and is not the sole propriety of a single company.
“Open source does not define an open ICT ecosystem, but it can be an important transformative element. To date, open source has been the most disruptive element of the entire open agenda, provoking re-examination of ICT ecosystems and policies,” the report, sponsored by IBM and Oracle, said.
In the eye of the open standards debate is software giant Microsoft Corp. Many countries have been contemplating the adoption of open formats for documents, spreadsheets and presentations in place of MS Office programs like Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
According to the authors of the report, the recommendations found favor with those present at the World Bank meeting. “I characterize the response as truly interested, engaged, asking as far as I could tell, just the right questions, that were really interested in the tension points, between open-source on one hand and open standards on the other,” said Charles Nesson, the founder of Berkman Center.
The report was put together by the Open ePolicy Group, which is a team of international experts from the public, private and non-governmental sectors. Jeff Kaplan is the founder and project director of this group.
