Norway open
This just in (well ok, I’ve been on holidays for two weeks): The Norwegian government just decided that all online public information must be accessible through open standards – mainly html, pdf and odf. This applies to all levels of government, which have until Jan 1. 2009 to comply.
Most beautiful of all, they have until 2014 to – hold on – reformat old documents.
This provokes all kinds of nice images in my mind, of grumpy old beuraucrats sitting in front of their Amstrad PCs and retyping 10-year old meeting protocols with two fingers in Open Office. Ok, to be honest I think my mental image is actually something more like the opening sequence of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and I guess it doesn’t have much to do with how this process is done… Actually I kind of suspect that this entire job could be automated, so I’m not entirely sure why the government needs six years to reformat docs into odts. But why be a spoilsport, this is a happy moment. Go Norway!
