ISOC.nl brought together several influential people to discuss about the implementation of Open Standards in government.

Ken Wasch , member of the Executive Committee from the ODF Alliance ,

Peter Strickx , Belgium Federal ICT department, Fedict ,

Thea Fierens , Member of Parliament for the Socialist party,

Kees Vendrik , Member of Parliament for the Green Party, (through video interview),

Jonathan Sage , head of Open Standards activities in Europe for IBM

Ken Wasch held a convincing presentation of the worldwide adoption of ODF. Criticism about accessibility problems has been heard recently in the press, but the latest update of the ODF format presents the needed features.

Mr Strickx was congratulated with the Belgium move to implement Open Standards. Belgium included Open Standards as a requirement for all government bodies in Belgium and shall be implemented by 2008. He would not comment on his position on Free Software, as the implementation of Open Standards has his priority. Mr. Strickx did not want to engage in this politically sensitive debate right now. Most of us know however that once the majority of users works with open formats, the move towards Free Software applications is much easier.

Kees Vendrik, who authored the motion in Dutch Parliament in 2002 to adopt Open Standards in government bodies by 2006, told us about the Dutch Ministries that are not executing the Parliamentary decision.

Thea Fierens explained about the adoption of the Web Guidelines, in other words: the governmental guidelines to be W3C compatible. In the same way she would favor the ODF and other open formats to become adopted and implemented in the Netherlands.

In the meantime Vendrik and his party have included a budget of 20 million euro per year in their election programme for the implementation of Open Standards in the Netherlands. We look forward to more Parliamentary debates about this. See the Video interview we had with Kees Vendrik: here (3,9 MB, Dutch) . Listen to Brenno de Winters Podcast (Dutch) about the complete evening programme, including the ISOC Awards.