(Note: this is an example of what this page will contain. These items have been pulled out of the collections of news items on the old website.)

07 Dec 2005

Open Document Format: A Matter of Sovereignty.
Government adoption of open standards would improve efficiency, continuity and transparency. Bangkok Post

06 Dec 2005

One city's move to open source.
The German city of Mannheim has moved the majority of its servers to systems that fully support open standards. It now plans to shift 3,500 desktop productivity suites to OpenOffice.org in pursuit of the city's desire to use OpenDocument. ZDNet UK

05 Dec 2005

IBM's OpenDocument Client Targets Emerging Economies.
Brazil, Russia, China, and India are interested in the OpenDocument standard because, the format allows these governments to more easily move among platforms. InformationWeek

16 Nov 2005

UK Agency introduces new IT Policy for Schools.
BECTA recommends that schools save documents using Open Formats. EUROPA-IDABC

23 Oct 2005

BECTA (British Education Communication Technology Agency), the agency responsible for formulating government IT policy for all UK schools, drew up a list of acceptable format for office applications:

• Plain text
• RTF
• CSV
• HTML
• OpenDocument

Download the file (PDF). Go to page 26 of this document.

27 Jun 2005

Norwegian Minister: Proprietary Formats No Longer Acceptable in Communication with Government.
Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer today at a press conference in Oslo declared "Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government. Tatle

22 Jun 2004

IDA promotes the use of open document formats for e-government interoperability.
At its meeting of 25 May 2004, the TAC (Telematics between Administrations Committee), composed of e-government policy-makers from the 25 EU Member States, endorsed a set of recommendations for promoting the use of open document formats in the public sector. EUROPA - EU Gateway