The Inevitability of the Universal, Portable Document Format

Shane Peterson does a superb & accurate chronological overview of the ODF situation in the CommonWealth of Massachusetts in Government Technology online.

In addition to its successful synthesis of the timeline and the grasp you get of why the Commonwealth is doing this, and how this poor company, Microsoft, is struggling to catch up, what stands out from this piece is the sense of confidence in the inevitability of the universal, portable document. The Commonwealth Executive Branch CIO, Louis Gutierrez, has it; and many members of the ODF community have it, but it is rare to see this confidence reflected in the press -- who have been very reluctant to see the common sense in a trend which would destablilize the status quo, and shake-up lazy-minds.

In the piece, Louis Gutierrez highlights the message of Gary Edwards, President & Founder of the OpenDocument Foundation, Inc., 501(c)3  [the author is an officer of <ODf/>]...

"The standard is about the format, not the application versus application," he said. "It's really a pointer toward something that Gary Edwards [founder and president of the OpenDocument Foundation] is very compelling in his discussion of -- we are heading toward a document-centric world and moving away from an application-centric world. It's going to be much more important how we structure, store and have workflow with standardized document forms than whether I'm using this or that version of this or that office productivity app."

CIO Gutierrez hits the fundamental points...

"You look at this and you say, 'Right now, we all rely on the Internet with its TCP/IP standard, and, boy, it's just like running water,'" he said. "That wasn't always the case, and in the early days, we used to wander around with different networking schemes, topologies and means of trafficking over the wire. Now we've come to a standard. It's not a vendor-specific standard, and it just works."

"The direction of this standard is almost self-evident," he said. "It really is compellingly useful and interesting to have governments start to traffic in open, standardized, XML-based document formats.

"To the extent we think of this as enabling the documents, that any given person at their desk saves, to better interoperate in broad-scale workflow, archiving and indexing -- that's when things get exciting and interesting," Gutierrez continued. "That's really the ultimate play here."

I'll reiterate: "The direction of this standard is almost self-evident."

Yet the process of getting state government to recognize the opportunity is slow. Minnesota is pursuing an open file format legislation initiative. Peterson quotes Minnesota State Representative, Paul Thissen, who introduced the legislation (HF 3971)...

"People, generally, in government have vague ideas of what open standards and open source are, but they don't understand specifically what the implications of those things are," Thissen said. "An education piece is important, which is part of the reason we wanted to raise it this year, and we're doing some work with local newspapers as well to write opinion pieces to educate the general public on how important this is."

So the persistent education about what just happened in Massachusetts will be ongoing -- and redundant in at least 49 discrete instances -- before the new new thing becomes the most widely agreed safe choice.