Jochen Friedrich's Open Blog

Leading on innovation policy with specifications from global ICT fora/consortia

2012-01-31T10:01:00.000+01:00

The ICT Standardisation Steering Committee which had been set up by the European Commission to advise on the ICT standardisation policy reform recently issued a detailed and interesting document on the importance of ICT specifications from fora/consortia for effective policy making in Europe. The ICT Steering Committee consists of a large number of relevant stakeholders in European ICT standardisation including Member States, ESOs, SMEs, consumers and industry. The paper was agreed to be available for public distribution.

The paper is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on the EU legal package on standardisation and the draft Regulation. It is definitely worth a read – and the good news: it contains an executive summary – for those who have got too many documents to read and enjoy getting things in a nutshell ;-)

N° 216 rev 2 paper on ict specifications and policies

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EU Draft Regulation on Standardisation – another glimpse into the ongoing debate

2012-01-13T10:59:00.000+01:00

This is a follow-on from the post I published yesterday. As mentioned yesterday, in the context of the discussions on the EU draft Regulation on standardisation the ICT part (i.e. Chapter IV, Articles 9 and 10) has got high visibility.

I also mentioned yesterday that the proposal is discussed that Articles 9 and 10 should be merged and that for every single recognition of an ICT forum/consortium standards Article 18 (3) of the draft Regulation should apply. This was, for instance, proposed by CEN/CENELEC, not sure why. And it found its ways into the current draft positions.

As I was stating this would be far to complicated and would run the risk of totally killing the procedure. This is because Article 18 (3) points back to other rules and regulations and to a detailed voting procedure of the Member States.

To further illustrate this I took the effort to dive into the respective legal documents and list the legal rules. The picture below gives a brief overview:

In my opinion such a decision making process is far too complicated for the given purpose and objectives. After all, the recognition of ICT fora/consortia specifications as proposed by the Commission does not lead to any legally binding situation to implement and use these specifications. Far from it. A positive recognition only means that the respective standards may be referenced in policies or procurement. In the end it remains the decision of the policy maker or the procurer whether to actually reference the standard.

With the ICT Platform where all stakeholders are members (including the Member States and the ESOs) there will be a high level of openness and transparency ensuring that the Commission gets proper advice for the decision making on whether to recognise a forum/consortium specification. In my opinion, the proposal to apply Article 18(3) would turn a lean process into a very formal and complicated procedure with the risk that is will not lead to results.

EU Draft Regulation on Standardisation – a glimpse into the ongoing debate in the European Parliament

2012-01-12T16:47:00.001+01:00

Entering into the new year the discussions and decision making in the European Parliament on the EU draft regulation on standardisation continues at full speed. I am trying to follow it from the outside as good as I can. And I must say the high level of the debate is impressive. The discussions are very informed and going into a level of detail that reflects the fact that the Parliament has been dealing with the topic for a long time recognising the high importance of standardisation for the economy and for innovation and growth in Europe. And I very much appreciate the high level of transparency in the work of the parliamentary committees where work is regularly documented.

Just before Christmas the committees involved completed their draft reports and opinions. Naturally enough, the passages in the draft regulation on ICT, in particular Chapter IV consisting of Articles 9 and 10, are always part of the debate. After all, ICT is of major importance for innovation, and the draft Regulation takes notice of that by proposing some changes to European standardisation in order to make global ICT specifications available for use in Europe in order to promote interoperability. And a good number of people are afraid of these changes and heavily lobby against them. But the good news here is that apparently everybody in Parliament agrees that it is necessary to have ICT fora/consortia specifications available for Europe and that, therefore, a process to recognise them – as proposed by the Commission – is urgently needed.

Looking at the draft report from ITRE (Committee on Industry, Technology and Research) – which is available on the ITRE website – I have the following comments on the amendments proposed therein:

Amendment 23 (on Article 9 of the draft Regulation)
This is where I have the strongest concern. The amendment proposes that for every single act of recognising an ICT specification from a forum/consortium an “examination procedure referred to in Article 18(3)” should be applied. In fact, this is a rather complicated procedure since Article 18(3) points back to Regulation 182/2011, Article 5, which, in turn, points back to the Treaty on European Union, Article 16(4) and (5). I did not check with any legal person, but what I understand is that the procedure would mean that for every single ICT recognition of a fora/consortia specification a formal voting process amongst Member States is required including some weighted voting and a blocking minority.
I believe this is far too heavy a process for the actual objective to be achieved. The issue to be solved is that the global ICT specifications which are anyway used everywhere are available for public procurement and for including in policy making – not in regulation (i.e. in New Approach directives). In other words: public authorities need to be able to say that they need TCP/IP, HTML, XML, UBL etc. in their tenders. And public authorities need to be able to include such specifications in innovation policy, e.g. when wishing to push new technologies like smart grid, eHealth, eMobility, etc. There is no way to avoid such specifications, anyway. But there is a need for clear guidance regarding their recognition for use in the public sector.
What the Commission proposes is that the new ICT Platform will provide advice to the Commission regarding the assessment of the fora/consortia specifications in question against the criteria listed in Annex II of the draft Regulation. Via this process it will ensured that all stakeholders are in involved in the consultation because they are all part of the ICT Platform – including Member States, industry, ESOs, SMEs, users. This should be sufficient to ensure an informed decision by the Commission regarding the fulfilment of the criteria of Annex II. There are enough checks and balances so that, in my opinion, an examination procedure according to Article 18(3) is not needed. I hope that ITRE will review this and reach the same conclusion. What Europe needs to be successful in ICT is a clear and lean process that will successfully be used to the benefit of Europe and of innovation.
General comment: too much weight on the European Standards Bodies (ESOs):
I highly value the ESOs and their role and work. And, no doubt, the ESOs should play a key role in consulting the Commission regarding the development of EU policy priorities and the impact and requirements on standardisation. However, the ESOs are not a government agency or a formal government institution – yet, my impression is that this is the way they are considered in a number of suggested amendments.
The ESOs are platforms for industry and other stakeholders for developing standards and specifications in support of the harmonised common European market. And standardisation is voluntary, which is a further key principle. Therefore, in my opinion, the currently proposed amendments should be reviewed avoiding that the ESOs are pushed into a quasi-governmental role in controlling policy making. That's not what they are there for. And for consultation it should primarily be the actual stakeholders in standardisation that are considered alongside using the expertise present in the ESOs.

The discussion will definitely continue. It will be interesting to see the next steps. After all, this is an important legal proposal that needs to last for the next one to two decades. It needs to be strong enough to ensure an efficient and effective standardisation system for Europe, and innovative enough for coping with the challenges of a more integrated and global standardisation ecosystem.

See also my previous posts on the topic of the EU legal package:
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/06/eu-commission-presents-legal-package.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/07/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/08/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/09/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2012/01/eu-legal-reform-on-european.html

EU legal reform on European Standardisation – broad support from ICT stakeholders for the ICT paragraph in the draft Regulation

2012-01-02T13:40:00.003+01:00

Just before Christmas ten stakeholder organisations in ICT standardisation joined forces for a joint submission on the passages on ICT standardisation in the draft Regulation that was presented by the European Commission and is currently under discussion in the European Parliament and the European Council. The joint submission makes a clear statement in favour of the approach proposed by the Commission. I uploaded the joint submission on slide share:

Joint position on ICT standardisation for Europe

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Essentially, the approach proposed by the Commission with Articles 9 and 10 in the draft Regulation

is lean but contains the necessary checks and balances and accommodates all needs of public authorities;
is widely supported by relevant stakeholders and ensures transparency and broad stakeholder involvement;
has all potential to promote interoperability in ICT in Europe which will have positive effects on competitiveness, innovation and growth;
is necessary for effective policy making in Europe where ICT are involved;
is necessary for public authorities to purchase state-of-the-art technologies.

There is a debate whether to merge articles 9 and 10 into one, whether to focus on procurement only and whether to introduce a lengthy and detailed process of approval by Member States before a specification from a forum/consortium can be used in EU policy making or procurement. Frankly speaking, such changes would kill the entire process. And I wonder whether they are not, in fact, off reality. I believe nobody ever asked the approval of the Member States when public authorities introduced WLAN or the internet as such – all based on open standards from fora/consortia. On the other hand, Europe needs to be able to reference fora/consortia standards in policies if Europe wants to take global leadership, e.g. in new innovative areas like smart grid, eEnergy, eMobility, eHealth – just to name a few. So whoever wishes to make the process more complicated (and unusable) or reduce it to procurement only plays with Europe's ability to be future ready and to lead.

I remain optimistic that the European Parliament and the Competitiveness Council do see the realities and will recognise the need for the ICT chapter in the draft Regulation (Chapter IV). There are a number of “fonctionnaires” around who argue against these changes to the European standardisation system, mainly for reasons to protect some monopolies. The actual stakeholders in standardisation, i.e. industry and technology providers, both large and small, however see the real world and the actual necessities – and have broad consensus on the need for change as proposed by the Commission. This joint submission is a major manifestation in this respect.

See also my previous posts on the topic of the EU legal package:
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/06/eu-commission-presents-legal-package.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/07/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/08/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html
http://jfopen.blogspot.com/2011/09/eu-legal-package-on-standardisation.html

On re-reading the Monti Report

2011-11-16T11:00:00.001+01:00

It's more than a year ago since I read the so called Monti Report, the report on "A new strategy for the single market at the service of Europe's economy and society, delivered in May 2010 to the European Commission by Professor Mario Monti who was a former EU Commissioner is now the new Italian Prime Minister. With Mr Monti starting in his new role I grabbed out the report again and gave it a re-reading last night.

To begin with, it is an excellent and very inspiring document. Worth reading - it is available on President Barroso's web site. From my standards perspective the report provides a number of interesting points on the benefits of standards and on the contribution standards and standardisation makes to growth and innovation in Europe. And - especially in the section on the digital single market - it takes a good and forward looking approach on ICT and the way it transforms societies and markets.

Let me just give you two appetizers - starting with a passage on digital technologies:

"2.3. Shaping Europe's digital single market
"Digital technologies are radically transforming the way we live, work and interact. The propagation of digital technology is a spontaneous process of innovation and transformation. Yet, regulatory and social conditions influence the speed and extent of the uptake of new technologies and the spread of the benefits of a digital economy. Europe is moving at a slower speed than the US. A number of obstacles reduce the capacity of industry in Europe to innovate and generate value added in the digital sphere: the fragmentation of online markets, ill-adapted intellectual property legislation, the lack of trust and interoperability, the lack of high-speed transmission infrastructure and the lack of digital skills. Many of these obstacles point to a simple cause: a lack of a Digital single market." (p. 44)

And specifically on standardisation:

"Reforming the standardisation process
"Standardisation is key for the governance of the single market. Europe needs today faster and more efficient setting of interoperable and market-relevant standards, based on internationally accepted models. It is necessary to review the European standards process, maintaining the benefits of the current system while striking the right balance between European and national dimension. Special attention should be paid to enhancing private sector access to the standardisation process and to making standards cheaper and easier to use for SMEs." (p. 50f.)

Many - if not all - of the points raised by Professor Monti have been taken up by the Commission, most notably in the various flagship initiatives. And the legal package on standardisation also nicely fits into this with a proposed Regulation that preserves the successful structures of European standardisation and complements them with necessary changes, e.g. in the filed of ICT, in order to promote competitiveness, innovation and growth in Europe.

Regarding the reform of ICT standardisation the Commission also very much worked according to what Professor Monti calles "smart regulation", i.e. with broad stakeholder involvement and consultations:

"For a smart regulation, policy making methods are equally important as legal techniques. Smart regulation means regulation informed by an accurate knowledge of the factors at play and by a sharp awareness of its potential impacts on the economy, the social context and the environment. The commitment to better regulation should continue. Impact assessment and stakeholders' consultation have proven their advantages in terms of quality of regulation, transparency and accountability. They are key features for reforming effectively the single market." (p. 94)

I recommend to everyone to read or re-read this report. Happy that it got back into my perspective with Professor Monti taking on his new role in Italy.

Announcement - Workshop from the EU Commission and EPO on ICT Standardisation and IPR

2011-11-16T10:00:00.000+01:00

Following up from the successful workshop on tensions between standardisation and IPRs jointly organised by the European Commission and the European Patent Office (EPO) in 2010 both organisations are again jointly organising a further workshop on the issue of patents, IPRs and ICT standardisation. This year the focus is on

"ICT Standards and Patents: The public authorities and international perspective:
how to increase transparency and predictability"

The formal announcement and the link to register are available on the Commission website. The agenda looks very interesting with a broad range of speaker from both leading international standards organisations and from the stakeholders in industry.

Interviews on the EU legal package on standardisation

2011-11-06T09:46:00.000+01:00

When speaking at the conference on standardisation and innovation, the SIIT, in Berlin the other day a number of speakers were interviewed including myself (see also my blog post on the SIIT). We were asked to give our opinions on the legal package and on the ICT part in particular.

BITKOM now posted all interviews on their Youtube channel. My responses can be seen in the two videos below. Beware, it's in German....

Statement on the legal package in general:

Statement on the ICT part of the legal package:

It is worth watching also the other interviews starring Renate Weissenhorn, Head of Unit Standardisation in the European Commission, Dirk Weiler, Chairman of the ETSI General Assembly, Friedrich Smaxwil, CEN President, Bernhard Thies, Chairman (CEO) of the German Electrotechnical Committee DKE.

German BITKOM Forum on Standardisation and the New Legilative Framework

2011-10-20T15:40:00.001+02:00

Today I participated in the BITKOM Forum on standardisation, technical regulation and market access. I was on the agenda in the first slot on the EU legal package on standardisation. The first speaker was Mme Anne Lehouck from the European Commission who gave an overview on the legal package with a focus on the ICT standardisation reform part in it. As second speaker I outlined the ICT industry position on the legal package and the needs we seen that make the proposed changes so utterly necessary.

The workshop reconfirmed that industry strongly supports the changes for ICT that are proposed in the legal package.

BITKOM will also publish the presentations shorts. If you like a preview view my slide deck on slide share:

1110bitkom forum ffm oct20_v002_final

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Breakfast Briefing in European Parliament: Global ICT Standards for Innovation and Growth in Europe

2011-10-20T15:26:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I participated in a breakfast briefing in the European Parliament on "Global ICT Standards for Innovation and Growth in Europe" focussing on the EU legal package on standardisation. Many thanks again to Malcolm Harbour, Chair of the EP's IMCO Committee, for being a perfect host for this event that was organised by OpenForum Europe. (You can watch some pictures of the event on the OFE website.)

The purpose of this briefing was to provide a broad range of opinions on the legal package on standardisation. We were five speakers, Sebastiano Toffaletti (NORMAPME and PIN-SME), Luis Jorge Romero (ETSI), Elisabeth Stampfl-Blaha (Austrian Standards Insitute), Carol Cosgrove-Sacks (OASIS) and myself (OpenFourm Europe). With this group we covered quite a range of perspectives. The good news: all speakers conceded that the ICT parts of the legal package and the proposed draft Regulation are good and deserve full support by Parliament and Council in the legal process.

I posted the draft for my speech on slide share - happy to receive comments.

View more documents from Jochen Friedrich.

EU legal package on standardisation: some aspects discussed in depth (III): How to ensure openness and transparency for assessing fora/consortia standards – including on the national level

2011-09-29T16:23:00.000+02:00

As the debate on the EU legal package on standardisation starts in the Council and in the European Parliament I hear voices – especially from one member state – that the assessment of fora/consortia standards against the criteria listed in Annex II of the draft Regulation should include a Public Enquiry in the process. And apparently even a further criterion along these lines is proposed. The main argument I hear for that is that SMEs and other national stakeholders should have an opportunity to follow the process and raise concerns when needed.

Well, I fully support the intention to have openness and transparency of the process of assessing fora/consortia specifications against the criteria. But to require a Public Enquiry and mean with it the a formal process as it is practiced in the development of European Standards / European Norms is not an appropriate proposal. This is full-fledged process for the development of harmonised standards and for reviewing the technical content of a draft European Standard / European Norm and make proposals for technical changes.

Asking for a Public Enquiry for the assessment of globally used and well-established fora/consortia standards would mean, for instance, to ask that the WLAN standard 802.11 from IEEE or TCP/IP from IETF or http or html etc. are submitted into a process that asks for technical comments. That would not meet the purpose which is to assess whether these fora/consortia standards were developed in open processes. And let's be clear: the process of Public Enquiry is not followed for a large number of standardisation deliverables from the ESOs, either, namely all those that are not European Standards / European Norms.

Yet, to say it again, I totally support the need for openness and transparency of the process. So how could that be done? Here are some considerations:

Whenever a new assessment process starts the Commission announces this publicly on a website.
This website is mirrored on a national level, e.g. by the National Standards Bodies which act as a “one stop shop” for national stakeholders, e.g. SMEs merely operating on a national level.
Subscription is possible both for the EU website as well as for the national mirroring website so that people get an automatic notification whenever a new assessment process starts. And this subscription should be available for anybody, not just members of the National Standards Bodies.
Everybody gets some time – e.g. something between four or six weeks – to provide comments when people believe that the specification under assessment does not comply with the criteria (NB: these are not technical comments!). These comments need to be considered by the parties executing the assessment and providing advice to the Commission.
The assessment statement is made public.

I believe these are straight forward proposals regarding the implementation of the process which is proposed in Article 9 of the draft Regulation. And perhaps we can call this a public enquiry procedure in some way. It contains a national notification – or better: a general notification process – which is similar to what is practised today in the notification process for EU standards development. I have subscribed and get regular mails whenever a notification by a national body is made.

So let's clarify a bit about processes and terminology. What the draft Regulation proposes is a new process for including global, well-established and widely implemented ICT fora/consortia standards into the European standardisation system and making them available for direct referencing in public procurement and EU policies. Public Enquiry is a process that is practiced for the development of harmonised European Standards / European Norms. This process does not fit the purpose. What is needed is some form of National Notification ensuring openness and transparency. This needs to be combined with a process for comments on whether the criteria are met and for ensuring that all comments are taken adequately into account. In combination with the ICT multi-stakeholder advisory platform where all stakeholders including the European Standards Organisations (ESOs), SMEs, Consumers, Member States are present, will provide the necessary checks and balances for the new process.

Standardisation and Innovation - Conference in Berlin

2011-09-29T09:26:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the 7th international conference on Standardisation and Innovation in Information Technologies (SIIT) which is held in Berlin this year, perfectly hosted by the Technical University of Berlin and Prof. Knut Blind. I was the fourth in a row of speakers from industry following speakers from Oracle on the Java Community Process, from Microsoft on defining open standards and from SAP on the economics of open innovation.

In my talk I tried to elaborate on the potential of innovation that lies in the implementation of standards and in technology integration. My slides are available on slideshare:

1109 siit jfriedrich v02

View more presentations from Jochen Friedrich.

All in all it was a very inspiring afternoon session. The conference continues today with a broad discussion on the legal package on standardisation - which, you may imagine, I will also follow with high interest.

Communication matters

2011-09-15T09:45:00.000+02:00

I just realised that my last blog post is already 6 weeks old. In between were some busy days and a lovely summer break. We spent a perfect beach holiday in the South of France – wonderful weather, wonderful people, wonderful landscape, wonderful food. I hope everyone else also had a nice summer and some relaxing days off.

Now I am back at work – and back to travelling today. I just changed trains at Cologne when I walked by the automatic ticket machines with huge queues in front of them. And I saw all the fellow-travellers with their online and electronic tickets. That triggered a thought.

Everyone in business – and actually anywhere else – knows how important communication is. On the other hand, we increasingly use electronic or automatic means for making our arrangements. We book online or at ticket machines, we do online banking at get our money out of cash machines, we make all kinds of arrangements in “do-it-youself” mode over the web – and, just to be clear, I like this because it saves you time and is efficient. However, it means that we don't interact with people at a counter anymore. We don't go there, tell the officer in charge what we want, get his advice, ask back, close the transaction by looking someone in the eye, giving a smile, getting a smile, saying “thank you” and “good bye”. In other words, we have got rid of a good deal of normal, daily conversation. And is a kind of business-style communication which gets lost, the communication you do for doing whatever kind of transaction.

In a way automisation and the web are only the current tip of a process that started decades ago. With big superstores where you walk yourselves along the shelves and load your trolley rather than going from one small shop to the next and telling the person behind the counter what you would like to have. In addition, we increasingly put children aside, e.g. by dropping them in a children's play corner before entering a shopping centre. They can enjoy themselves and we don't get bothered with bored kids who want to get out of the shop while we still want to try another pair of trousers or check for another item on our list. By the way, I recently read somewhere that big stores start to install also men's corners where women can drop their male companions before going shopping – LOL...

Now, as already mentioned above, I don't want to say that the good old days were fantastic and that technology, automisation and the web are bad and should not be used. Far from it. I love the web, I love doing transactions online, I appreciate superstores with their huge choice of goods, etc. But I wonder whether there is some consequence regarding daily practice of communication that we need to be more aware of and react to. And I could imagine that it mainly effects business communication. That it effects the way, the naturalness in communicating with customers and clients and also with colleagues. After all, we are spending huge amounts of money and effort on training of softskills etc. I wonder whether this has ever been addressed in some socio-linguistic study or experiment. Would be very interesting.

Anyway, I believe that we should pay some attention on this issue (if you agree that it is an issue) especially regarding our children. Let's not further put them aside of daily communication, let's not “store” them at neighbours or friends when you go shopping or deal with a craftsman or whatever. But expose them to such daily business. Encourage them to take some walks, go the baker's or the newspaper shop or whatever themselves. Make them order things and thus get prepared for clarifying questions from a clerk, for responding back, etc. And teach them to say hello to neighbours, to say “please” and “thank you”, etc.

I love the moment when the people in the queue before a ticket machine start talking to each other, for instance, because someone doesn't know how the machine works or doesn't get what he/she wants. And suddenly communication is back and people start dealing with each other – with a smile, looking someone in the eye, saying please and thank you ;-)

EU legal package on standardisation: some aspects discussed in depth (II): The need of referencing fora/consortia specifications in EU policies

2011-08-01T17:42:00.001+02:00

The various discussions about the legal package on standardisation reveal that there seems to be a lot of uncertainty about what policies are – especially since the Commission proposes changes for ICT to enable direct referencing of ICT fora/consortia standards in EU policies. There is confusion with legislation, regulations and directives – and more.

In general, this might not be surprising because the term “policies” is hard to translate from English into several of the European languages. In German, for instance, we don't have a really equivalent expression. Sometimes we use “Politik” as in “Industriepolitik” (industrial policy) or in “Innovationspolitik” (innovation policy). Many times, however, we need work-arounds in the tranlsation which don't make a proper and clear understanding easier.

In the Communication “A strategic vision for European standards” (COM(2011)311), which is one of the two essential parts of the legal package, the Commission expresses at the very beginning that “European standards and standardisation are very effective policy tools for the EU” (1.1).

A bit further down, in section 3, the Commission elaborates that

“In areas of high political and economic importance, standards can be used strategically to accelerate the development of innovative solutions, including through the deployment of ICT. In the twenty-first century Europe faces a number of strategic challenges, in particular in areas where standards have particularly strong potential to support EU policy, such as consumer protection, accessibility, climate change, resource efficiency, security and civil protection, protection of personal data and individuals' privacy and the use of ICT for interoperability in the Digital Single Market. […]
“European standardisation can support legislation and policies on climate change, green growth and can promote the transition to a low carbon and resource efficient economy.”

Finally, in section 6 on ICT, the Commission announces that “In EU policies, the Commission will increasingly use selected ICT standards that comply with the same set of quality criteria, in particular when the interoperability between devices, applications, data repositories, services and networks must be further enhanced.” (Action 20)

In other words, a policy in this context is an instrument for promoting technologies and objectives of key public interest (like interoperability). Especially in innovation policy – as a sub-interest of industrial policy in general – do modern ICT technologies and interoperability play a key role. And especially there are ICT specifications from global fora/consortia critical because you cannot build a single ICT system without using these specifications. And the same is true for all systems that integrate ICT technologies like all of the e* and smart* areas, e.g. eHealth, smart energy, eMobility, intelligent transportation, etc.

I recently showed this slide below which helped to create an understanding why it is important to have ICT specifications from fora/consortia available for direct referencing in policies:

Today global ICT specifications from fora/consortia are critical especially in those areas where a lot of potential for innovation is in the integration of technologies and thus in the combination of standards. If Europe wants to take leadership in innovation policy in such areas it needs to be able to directly reference the required standards and specifications in the respective policies. And this means the full set of all required standards and specifications – not just a subset produced by the ESOs or so.

Therefore, the Commission proposal for changes to ICT standardisation in Europe and the strategic directions as given in the Communication (as quoted above) entirely make sense. And more: they are an essential part of the legal package and deserve full support.

Hearty food

2011-07-29T16:19:00.002+02:00

Now, did anyone ever get a pizza like this? It was a big laugh when it arrived for me the other day. The cook and the servant even wished to get a picture of it.

Have a good weekend everyone - and enjoy your pizzas ;-)

EU legal package on standardisation: some aspects discussed in depth (I): The global nature of fora/consortia

2011-07-22T14:26:00.000+02:00

On June 1 the European Commission adopted its legal package on European Standardisation with two major documents: The Commission Communication “A strategic vision for European standards: Moving forward to enhance and accelerate the sustainable growth of the European economy by 2020” (COM(2011)311) and the draft Regulation on “European Standardisation” (COM(2011)315). I blogged about this right after the adoption when the documents were available.

Since then the documents have been widely read and public comments are made and the documents are debated. With this post I am starting a series on discussing some aspects a bit more in depth that are raised in public discourse – or at least add some thoughts to points that are raised and discussed. So here's part one – on

The global nature of fora/consortia

The draft Regulation adopted by the Commission introduces a process for allowing the recognition of ICT standards from fora/consortia so that they can be directly referenced in public procurement and in EU policies. They need, however, need to meet the condition of being assessed against a set of quality criteria listed in Annex II of the draft Regulation.

While the need for this complementary change to the European standardisation system is widely accepted because it takes into consideration the global realities in ICT standardisation, there are some who spread a good deal of FUD regarding fora/consortia. The strongest piece of bad mouthing is probably the claim that fora/consortia were US-based and US-dominated and would operate in competition to the European Standards Organisations (ESOs). Therefore, recognising the ICT standards from fora/consortia would solely benefit US interests, say those "spreaders of FUD".

To be very frank: this is total nonsense, and people who spread this either deliberately wish to create bad feelings against fora/consortia or at best simply repeat what others said without checking the facts. And they seem to be at a total loss to imagine what a global organisation is and how it works. Different from other sectors, standardisation in the ICT sector evolved on a global basis with new global organisations establishing as the leading ICT standards development organisations. Prominent examples are the IETF, W3C or OASIS. These bodies operate in very open and transparent ways with a broad membership from all geographies and encompassing all stakeholders including public authorities, academia, SMEs and large, multinational companies.

Europe has a strong voice in global industry fora and consortia regardless of where these organisations are registered legally. And Europe has all potential to further build on this strength. In the following I put together some facts taken from the information publicly available on the organisations' web sites:

W3C was founded in 1994 by an Englishman, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in collaboration with CERN, the European research lab. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) in France became the first European W3C host and in 2003, ERCIM (European Research Consortium in Informatics and Mathematics), also based in France, took over the role of European W3C host from INRIA. Today, W3C has 326 Members, 40% of which are European. Government participation is also strong, and it could be increased – a development that is very much desired by W3C and its members.

Or looking at OASIS, both, the current Director-General of OASIS and the current chair of the OASIS Board of Directors are of European origin. More Europeans are among the members of the Board of Directors. Regarding the representation of stakeholder groups in OASIS, roughly 32% are SMEs and 28% are administrations and academia. So the three combined are even a clear majority of organisational participants. In addition, OASIS allows individual membership and an individual's vote on OASIS standards is worth that of an organisation. As far as geographic distribution of OASIS members is concerned 30% are European, 15% are from Asia Pacific, the rest are from the Americas.

Furthermore, looking at the IETF (Interent Engineering Task Force), it's chair of the Architecture Board is European and also an SME. And looking at IEEE, by 2010 the organisation had over 395,000 members from 160 countries. These are just some examples that powerfully illustrate the global nature of fora/consortia and leadership role Europe is taking in some of the relevant global ICT fora and consortia.

So bottom line: these leading ICT fora/consortia have all rights to claim that they are genuinely global organisations with global membership as well as a broad scope of stakeholders amongst the members, including industry – both large, small and “micro” –, academia, governments, users, etc. Let's hope that such facts help to discredit the statements that are made against fora/consortia as what they actually are: attempts to put a negative flag on successful global organisations.

And besides: the processes in place in these fora/consortia are exemplary in terms of openness and transparency - e.g. allowing everyone around the globe to follow the work and provide comments regardless of whether people are a member of the organisation or not. This is standards bodies governance at its best.

The impact of network effects on collaboration

2011-07-06T14:40:00.001+02:00

As stated before, I believe in collaboration and collaborative efforts in developing positions and driving topics. In other words, I believe in the wisdom of crowds. For effective collaboration the appropriate tools are needed. What is, of course, embarrassing is when network effects lead to a severe impact on collaboration and exclude people from participating in the collaborative effort and from the information.

It happened to me again the other day when trying join a meeting. As mentioned several tims in my blog I run a Linux operating system. For this meeting a collaboration session had been set up, but when trying to join I got the following message:

This is a typical network effect due to a lack of interoperability. The collaboration tool is designed to work with certain OS and browsers. And people who happen to use these technologies don't actually reflect much about it. They take it for granted. So no blame on those who set up the meeting. That's the ugly thing about network effects.

What is needed is genuine interoperability, not just intra-operability. This will avoid effects that you can only use one tool if you have a specific OS or vice versa. Imagine a situation where you can participate in a telephone conference only if you use a phone from a specific company or have signed up with a specific phone network operator. Everybody would reject this - and rightly so. Network effects of that kind manifest lock-in situations and prevent fair and open competition and negatively impact business decisions on which OS or which SW to choose. In other words, software interoperability is critical the more me move into the age of networked economies and societies.

Blogging - transforming the public sphere

2011-06-10T09:15:00.000+02:00

A while ago I posted a bit of an "academic text" ;-) titled "On Blogging or A New Era in the Transformation of the Public Sphere". My key thesis was (and still is) that blogging, web 2.0 technologies, social media in general will drive societies in to a new era of Enlightenment by facilitating a broad, public discourse. Therefore, they will have a key role in how public opinion is shaped. To quote from my old post:

"Blogging and social networking will change the way our societies work and how social systems are transforming. Blogging and social networking are on the forefront of eParticipation and eDemocracy. And these new forms of communication and networking break the traditional constellations of the public, the political sphere, the media, etc."

Yesterday I was travelling by train once again and got hold of the wonderful, highly enlightening and inspiring essay from Lina Ben Mhenni - one of the leading activists in Tunisia pushing the "Tunisian revolution" of this year. In the German translation her essay is called "Vernetzt Euch!" (Get Connected). BTW, the title and the booklet in German are styled similar to the publication of Stéphane Hessel's essay "Indignez-vous!" ("Empört Euch!") which still - and rightly - occupies a large part of the political discourse in Europe. In the French original, Lina Ben Mhenni's essay is titled "Tunisian girl, blogguese pour un printemps arabe".

Lina Ben Mhenni's essay confirms the key role of blogging and social media in the transformation of the public sphere. It shows the strong influence bloggosphere had on creating a critical public opinion and mobilising people to finally overthrow the authoritarian Tunisian leadership in a peaceful revolution.

Her point is pretty straight forward: Blogging and social media is about freedom of speech and allowing people to participate in public discourse and make up their own mind. The cover text quotes her saying, "I want that the world changes. But it will only change if the truth will be spread, if we get connected." (My own translation).

I can only highly recommend reading this essay. Apart from giving great insights into the courageous activities of Lina Ben Mhenni and other Tunisian bloggers it points at how the future political discourse will look like and will be organised. Highly enlightening and thought provoking.

EU Commission presents legal package for revised European Standardisation System

2011-06-03T12:54:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday this week the European Commission adopted the legal package on standardisation. It consists of a Communication outlining the strategic thinking and directions for European standardisation and of a Regulation that will lay down the legal principles and constitute the future European standardisation framework. Both texts plus some accompanying material like the Impact Assessment are available from the DG Enterprise website.

To begin with, the legal package is excellent – highest congratulations to the Commission. It addresses the urgent needs for European standardisation that had been identified in the studies and reports over the last years. Above all, it addresses the needs of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector which has developed different structures globally with well-established fora and consortia being in the lead of ICT standards development. The legal package, following the Digital Agenda, takes this up and provides well-thought-out and sophisticated solutions. They build on the current European standardisation system which proved to be effective and efficient, but complement it with important means taking into account the global realities in ICT.

The major points that are new are:

Advisory Platform for ICT standardisation policy: In 2011, the Commission will establish “a dedicated multi-stakeholder platform to advise the Commission on matters relating to the implementation of standardisation policy in the ICT field” (Communication, Action 21). This ICT platform will help to provide expert advice on ICT standardisation fast and and from all stakeholders, which will help to increase efficiency in a highly dynamic and global domain.

Process for direct referencing of ICT standards from fora/consortia: A process will be implemented to “recognise technical specifications which are not national, European or international standards” provided that they meet a set of openness criteria (Regulation, Articles 9 and 10; see also my next point). The Commission makes very clear that this is about “selected ICT standards that are widely accepted by the market” and “in areas where the ESOs are not active, where ESO standards have not gained market uptake” (Communication, Action 19) – so this is not about recognising more organisations, it is about complementing the current system on a by-need basis and where it makes sense.

And the Commission stresses that

direct referencing of these fora/consortia standards will be allowed for public procurement (Communication, Action 19);
fora/consortia standards will increasingly be used in EU policies, especially to foster interoperability (Communication, Action 20);
the Member States are encouraged to increase the use of fora/consortia standards in public procurement (Communication, Action 22).

Introduction of a set of “quality criteria”: Annex II of the Regulation lays down “Requirements for the recognition of technical specifications in the field of ICT” including a set of criteria that need to be met if fora/consortia standards are to be used in the public sector. These criteria basically follow the WTO Principles thus ensuring that a certain level of

openness, transparency etc. are given.

These new elements for ICT standardisation in Europe do not revolutionise the system. But they provide a necessary extension for Europe to be able to operate effectively in the ICT domain. The Commission rightly addresses

(a) public procurement where public administrations need to be able to reference the relevant global standards in their tenders in order to purchase and build modern ICT infrastructures and to achieve genuine interoperability; and

(b) policy making where fora/consortia standards are essential for a full, end-to-end solution given, for instance, that ICT becomes more and more ubiquitous so that ICT standards are an important element in the integration of technologies in innovative areas. You could name a number of examples here, including smart grid, intelligent transportation, eGovernment, eHealth, e-mobility, etc. In other words: ICT standards have high relevance for an effective industrial and innovation policy. With the new Regulation policy makers have the instrument ready to pursue their objectives in a more conclusive and comprehensive way with up-to-date global technologies being available for use.

There is a large potential where Europe will benefit from these changes. Think about the boost of innovation and growth that the internet and the world wide web have triggered. Think about all the SMEs in Europe that took benefit alongside the big global technology providers from the internet technologies and the open standards available for used and implementation. This decade will see more such innovation and technology integration in many areas building on top of the internet and its technologies. ICT will provide intelligent layers on top of the current infrastructures and on top of physical layers in order to optimise processes and supply chains. This is where ICT standards play a major role and where they are needed in Europe for innovation and growth.

In this context I also welcome the high focus the Commission puts on interoperability: “ICT standards developed by leading Global ICT for a and Consortia can be used in public procurement to help avoid lock-in and encourage competition in the supply of interoperable ICT services, applications and products“ (Communication, chapter 6, p.16). And in the same way in the context of policy making the Commission points out the importance of fora/consortia standards “in particular when the interoperability between devices, applications, data repositories, services and networks must be further enhanced” (Communication, chapter 6, p.16).

All this shows the high level of sophistication underpinning the legal package. I have been following the topic and have been involved in expert group discussions about it for about 5 years. Sometimes I had the feeling that there were too many discussions and iterations. But I must say now that the Commission really made the best of all the investigations that were undertaken. This legal package shows a level of balance and deep understanding of the problems that is remarkable. And it is an excellent piece of input into the legislative process which will start soon now with the Parliament and the Council discussing the topic towards reaching the final agreement on the Regulation.

There are for sure some groups who don't like the proposed changes. Some may be afraid of losing influence and power. Others may be concerned that not every detail of the new processes is laid down and addressed already in this legal package. Well, this is the same as with any changes that are introduced. Fact is, the legal package provides complementary processes, nothing is being taken away from anybody, but the work that is going on elsewhere is recognised. And the more detailed processes quite naturally will be worked out when the new instruments come into place. The platform will work out its procedures, processes for making sure that the fora/consortia specifications meet the requirements and criteria need to be set up, etc. But all of this is business as usual. And nothing that should be part of a legal document.

No doubt, the Commission's legal package marks a milestone after the long and in depths discussions on the future of European standardisation. An excellent basis to build on.

In the news: Oracle transfers OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation

2011-06-02T15:03:00.000+02:00

As it was announced yesterday, OpenOffice goes to the Apache Foundation. It's in the press all over - see for instance the article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet: "Oracle gives OpenOffice to Apache". This is an interesting move - after months of speculation what is going to happen with OpenOffice there is clarity now. This will certainly be good for customers as well as for the entire portfolio of implementations of the Open Document Format (ODF).

New OpenForum Europe monitoring report on EU public procurement available - 13% government IT tenders illegally specify brands

2011-05-23T19:42:00.000+02:00

OpenForum Europe (OFE) today published a new monitoring report of public tenders. Similar to the results found in previous years there is still a high number of public tenders that illegally specifies brand names. According to OFE "13 % of a sample of tenders published in the Supplement to the Official Journal of the European Union made reference to specific trademarks or brand names".

Now, to be very clear, this figure does not accuse public procurers of following illegal practices. There is a lot of lack of knowledge prevailing as well as apparent lack of alternatives in case of lock-in situations. Yet, the report gives a good indication on issues where open and fair competition is impacted. There is only one remedy: a clear route for open procurement.

The full report is available on the OFE website. Definitely worth reading.

The UK Open Standards Survey - moving ahead with open standards for eGovernment

2011-05-19T16:52:00.004+02:00

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the new UK procurement policy which mandates openness and open standards for public procurement. I made very clear that the UK policy should be more clear to express that this requirement is limited to software interoperability. It is the level of formats, protocols, APIs where full openness matters. Because you wish to integrate different technologies and promote interoperability by the use of open standards which in turn provides a base for innovation. We saw this – and are still seeing this – in the internet and world wide web where open standards significantly contributed in boosting innovation.

As was to be expected the UK government is broadly criticised for the leadership they took on openness. Earlier this week h-online gave a nice overview of some of the criticism. For sure, standards bodies that do not have an option for Royalty-free licensing in their IPR policies are worried that the standards they produce won't meet the UK government's requirements. Well, we've heard and seen all this before in the debate about the EIF.

This is clearly an issue for the formal standards organisations like the European standardisation organisations (ESOs) because they do not allow a clear option for Royalty-free licensing – yet. However, the more we come into areas where a large part of innovation is in the integration of technologies it may be important to the stakeholders to have standards available as open standards under terms and conditions that allow broad and unencumbered adoption and implementation. This includes the need for implementing a standard in open source. But it is also critical for all the companies – including the many SMEs – who work on providing innovative products, solutions, services on top of the current technologies or physical layers. In other words, being able to support different IPR regimes may well be a critical element for the competitiveness of the ESOs.

But back to the UK procurement policy. Following the publication of this policy the UK government launched a public survey on open standards. Deadline for submissions is tomorrow, Friday, May 20. And the open standards definition is part for the survey which probably is what actually makes it spicy.

Now, as ever so often, I believe there is too much FUD created about it all by those who don't like to see the term open standard. My 'five cents' – or should I say pence ;-) ? – on this are:

The UK government needs to be congratulated for its leadership on openness and open standards for software interoperability in the public sector.
As mentioned above, the UK government should clarify that the scope of its requirement for open standards is software interoperability. This is pretty obvious from the content of the standards survey, but it might be worth saying it clearly so that confusion and irritations are being prevented.
An open standards policy for software interoperability will neither prevent nor impact the use of RAND-based standards and specifications in other areas where software interoperability is not at stake.
It may be worth – and helpful in the heated debate – to consider areas where open standards are not (yet) available. In this case the fall-back solution should be to use standards or specifications that are less open. This is also what the EIF proposes, by the way.
And it may be worth considering that a transition period is needed in areas where no open standards or no standards at all (because proprietary technologies prevail) are used today. In this case it could be made clear that a transition phase is needed. In other words: add some element of pragmatism to the overall policy. This is probably common sense anyway, but it might help if it is written down somewhere. And no doubt, any such exceptions process needs to be very clearly and transparently documented.

And most notably, the conditions defined are not totally new, nor absurd or far off. They are met in the marketplace already today – so what's the trouble all about?

I expect that this debate about open standards and the definition very much overshadows the actual survey with the long list of standards and specifications. This is a pity because this is the actual purpose of the exercise. And it is very important that governments think about the standards they wish to recommend and use.

In this context it is also advisable that the government classifies standards differently. While it is important in some areas to mandate the use of specific standards, e.g. for achieving interoperability and ensuring a level playing field for all technology providers, in other areas it may be sufficient to recommend them. And the classification should also contain a category like “under observation”, e.g. for standards and specifications that have not yet established on the market but address a new and innovative area.

In general, a public survey on these standards might be too big a task. For giving good and valid recommendations about the individual standards and specifications a thorough level of understanding and detailed knowledge is important. For sure the public survey can give a first indication on the standards and specifications, their relevance and classification. But further detailed work including the key stakeholders will be needed for a clear, transparent and well documented procedure in coming up with the final list and classifications.

What, however, should definitely be excluded from the final standards list are proprietary technologies and formats. These are not standards and create a barrier to interoperability as well as lock-in situations.

It will be interesting to see how this is proceeding and what the final result will be. But anyway, again congratulations to the UK government for the leadership they are taking.

Interesting blog on open data

2011-05-17T08:46:00.000+02:00

As I was saying in my previous blog post the topic of open data is gaining increasing attention with incredible speed. There is a very interesting blog available in German on the site of the online portal from the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit. It covers the wide variety of topics around open data. Worth browsing through for all that understand some German.

Preparing the grounds for open data - an area that is moving with exceptional speed

2011-05-12T10:35:00.000+02:00

Over the last two days I had the pleasure to attend a most interesting and inspiring workshop on open data. Opening up public sector information (PSI) has been identified by the European Commission as an important way to promote collaborative innovation. And since public data is stored in digital formats this is also a key action item in the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE).

This workshop was organised jointly by ETSI and W3C within the Share-PSI initiative they both kicked off. IBM had submitted a position paper to the workshop which I had the honour to present. Both the paper and my presentation are available on the PSI website.

The workshop was impressive since it covered an unexpectedly broad spectrum on open data including a number of interesting use cases. There seems to be some focus on working with data in various contexts of urban life and on geographical data. But most notably, the speed with which PSI is gaining attendance and with which new entrepreneurs mushroom and jump on making use of public data in collaborative innovation and provide value-add offerings and services is enormous.

Governments, especially on the local level, seem sometimes to be struggling whether they should open up their data and whether this should be done without asking for fees. But the general tendency seems to be that opening up PSI needs to be seen as a kind of industrial or innovation policy which helps to promote innovation and which will lead to valuable new results beyond of what governments would normally produce. In other words: leveraging the community effect and collaborative innovation will pay back largely the cost that are required for providing the data.

Not surprisingly, my presentation was on the need of open standards and of interoperability for PSI. The internet can be prime example for PSI, as well, of how innovation can be triggered with open standards. Machine readable formats are essential so that the data can be used easily and without encumbrances. There are some standards and technologies available already today. As a next step an inventory should be produced on which standards and specifications are available, functional gaps should be identified and a requirements definition process for the standards and specifications that are to be used should be initiated.

Secondly, a coordinated, pan-European approach should be pursued including providing guidance to national and local governments so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel. Therefore I was very pleased that two speakers from the Commissions ISA programme were speaking at the workshop stressing the need for pan-European interoperability and illustrating how the SEMIC.EU platform works. In my opinion, what is needed for open data is something like a European PSI Framework that addresses all the issues at stake, be it the legal side, the technologies, the standards, etc.

As a use case from which to draw some experience I mentioned City Forward which is about sharing data from cities and metropolitan areas and which was initiated by IBM. A number of cities world wide already contribute and a good number of results is available, as well.

In parallel to this Share-PSI initiative the Openforum Academy jointly with others initiated the Open Data Challenge which is still running. Another lighthouse initiative around open data.

The next milestone in the debate about open data / PSI is a workshop session at the upcoming Digital Agenda Assembly mid of June. The only point I missed in yesterday's workshop was developing some specific policy advice to be presented at the Digital Agenda Assembly. But perhaps this expectation might have been too high for this first broad workshop on the topic. And by the way, the winners of the Open Data Challenge will also be announced and honoured at the Digital Agenda Assembly.

And later on, in July, a large conference is organised in Marseille called the “Open Data Garage”.

All of this further illustrated the speed – and the enthusiasm – with which this relatively new area is progressing. Hey, there's something really new, important and innovative is going on here. And it's exciting to be involved and be part of it.

For those of you who wish to take a closer look at what was discussed in the Share PSI workshop - collaborative note taking was organised via Etherpad and the hashtag to look for in Twitter is #daa11psi.

Time to walk the talk? – New Study on procurement practice in Sweden regarding open standards and document formats

2011-04-21T17:11:00.000+02:00

A very good and in depth study was recently launched on procurement practice in Sweden. It is worth reading – freely available on the ePractice web site.

The study to some extend focusses on the use of open standards and on document formats. This is done against the background that, as Commissioner Vice-President Neelie Kroes had expressed earlier,

“No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to use a particular company’s technology to access government information.” (Neelie Kroes, 2008). Being Open About Standards. Brussels, June 10, SPEECH/08/317).

What Neelie Kroes had postulated as a basic direction for Europe has also been reconfirmed in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), issued by DG DIGIT in December 2010. As one of the key recommendations made in the EIF, Recommendation 8 says:

“Public administrations should not impose any specific technological solution on citizens, businesses and other administrations when establishing European public services.” (EIF, Section 2.12)

This new study that was conducted in Sweden built on previous inquiries into the same topic area. These previous pieces of research had shown that there is a severe gap between such basic propositions and directions as listed above and the actual practice in governments in Sweden. This new study focussed on two key topic areas:

“In the first section, the municipalities were asked about document formats, specifically the format actually used by each municipality in their earlier communication with us. […] The second section related to software procurement, and in particular that related to software for
writing office documents.” (Study, p. 5).

The responses are very, very interesting. They show the full dilemma public authorities are in – especially regarding lock-in situations because of their continued use of proprietary office software that is not standards based. They show that the topics of interoperability and open standards are present in government considerations in Sweden. Clearly, awareness has increased a lot. Yet, actions and consequences are still missing.

All in all this study is very worth reading. My personal conclusion is that public administrations should start to be stronger on mandating open standards and requiring interoperability for the software used in eGovernment. It is time to walk the talk – and to push on making the objectives come reality.

20 years of Linux - a great success story

2011-04-12T14:58:00.000+02:00

For 2.5 years now I am completely on Linux. And I can honestly say I'm a happy customer. I am running a Linux operating system on my ThinkPad with all business relevant software running smoothly on it. IBM Lotus Notes runs perfectly on Linux, and so does IBM Lotus Symphony for office applications implementing the Open Document Format (ODF), and so do the IBM collaboration tools, e.g. for instant messaging, etc. I have a choice of web browsers, e.g. Firefox and Google Chrome. And a lot more business critical software runs without problems.

Linux is fast - the machine boots in next to no time - and extremely reliable. Updates are automatically provided and security is dealt with very elegantly. In other words: Linux really made it.

These days Linux celebrates its 20th anniversary. An operating system for everyone. Easy to get, easy to install, easy to use. A great success story.

The Linux Foundation has produced a lovely little clip on the story of Linux. It is available on their website as well as in youtube.

Take a look - it is good fun....

Relevant link of today: ComputerWeekly article on procurement of the European Comission

2011-04-05T15:49:00.003+02:00

ComputerWeekly.com is featuring an interesting article today on the decision of the European Commission, DG DIGIT, to go into negotiations with Microsoft on buying Windows 7 operating system licences by the way of "proceeding under an exceptional clause of competition law that allows the commission to exclude other software vendors from a chance of winning the business". The article raises the questions in how far this is due to lock-in into proprietary single-vendor technology and in how far the Commission, with this decision, does act against its own principles as expressed in the Digital Agenda:

"Microsoft lock-in forces European Commission into Windows 7 upgrade talks
"Mark Ballard
"Tuesday 05 April 2011 12:54

"The European Commission has been forced into extraordinary negotiations with Microsoft because it is locked in to using the vendor's software [...] "

And the author quotes Commissioner Kroes with a statement on lock-in made at an event last year:

"Commission vice-president Neelie Kroes cited vendor lock-in as one of the motives for the Digital Agenda when she was campaigning for it last year.

"'Many authorities have found themselves unintentionally locked in to proprietary technology for decades,' Kroes said in a speech in June 2010.

"'After a certain point, that original choice becomes so ingrained that alternatives risk being systematically ignored, no matter what the potential benefits. This is a waste of public money that most public bodies can no longer afford,' she said"

Read the full article online on ComputerWeekly.com. See also a previous post on this topic when NYT had addressed the same issue.

Openforum Academy Report on "Achieving European Interoperability"

2011-04-04T17:21:00.000+02:00

I have the honour of being a Fellow of the Openforum Academy. The Openforum Academy is an independent programme, you could call it a think tank, bringing together people from industry and academia in order to provide new input and insight into the key issues which impact the openness of the IT market.

A couple of week's ago I had the pleasure to share a roundtable debate which was part of the Openforum Academy's INSIGHTS programme. The basic idea behind this programme is to facilitate broad and open discussion on a key topic and derive a report on the topic based on the discussion held and contributions made.

This time the topic was "Achieving European Interoperability". More precisely, we discussed about the Commission Communication "Towards Interoperability for European Public Services" that was published shortly before Christmas with the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS) and the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) as annexes. And we worked out on what needs to come next in order to really achieve interoperability and make things real. Attendance in the roundtable event was outstanding. We had expert participants from the Commission, some Member States, as well as representatives from industry - both large and small, from academia and from overseas. Andy Updegrove had flown in to give the introductory keynote.

The full report on the topic is now available for download from the Openforum Academy website. I am still astonished on the quality of the roundtable discussion and therefore on the actual "insights" this report provides. Above all, I was happy to get confirmation on the strong request for openness from all sides, be it the Commission or Member States. It is seen as a major pre-requisite for pan-European interoperability. But having chaired the discussion I am almost bound to like it. So best if you read yourselves....

Open Document Format for business - the right way to go

2011-04-04T10:14:00.000+02:00

It is sometimes astonishing how things coincide. I was travelling once again last week and hence stayed in a hotel. Wednesday last week, March 30th, was Document Freedom Day 2011. Exactly that day I had been working on a document which I had to print out. When preparing for printing in the hotel's business corner I expected to see some office software that was not able to handle <<.odt>> format (the text format of Open Document Format (ODF)). Therefore, I uploaded my file on Google docs using the cloud this time - I really did not want to save it as <<.doc>> but stay a bit more modern.

Now, what a positive surprise when coming to the hotel's business corner. They were running Open Office. Open Document Format - THE standard for office software. I must admit, I was too pessimistic regarding the widespread use of ODF-based office software. Too often you see people use proprietary office technology that does not support the ODF standard.

But ok, I see that I must revert my preconceptions which are apparently too negative and outdated. Indeed, I saw some statistics the other day which found out that in 2010 in Germany about 22% of internet users had an ODF-based office software installed (see the survey done by Webmasterpro). So market share is increasing. And I had an important initiation experience in this respect just on Document Freedom Day 2011 - that deserves me right, I should say.

UK government issues modern procurement policy statement focussing on openness and interoperability

2011-03-04T15:31:00.001+01:00

The UK government recently issued a procurement policy note available on the UK government website. It is a very clear and crisp policy document, only two pages long, taking a clear stance on openness and interoperability and requiring to reference open standards in public tenders whenever possible. This is what items 4 and 5 of the policy very clearly say:

“4. Government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services for citizens and businesses.

5. For this reason, Government departments should ensure that they include open standards in their ICT procurement specifications unless there are clear business reasons why this is inappropriate.”

And the document continues to provide a similarly clear and straight forward open standards definition with four key elements. In essence – and in my own words – an open standard must be: (i) developed in an open standards development process; (ii) approved by a well established standards development organisation; (iii) thoroughly documented and publicly available at zero or low cost; and (iv) available for implementation under IPR Royalty-free licensing terms.

In this way the UK procurement policy exactly prescribes what is needed in the area of eGovernment services and software interoperability where Open Source software plays an important role. The open standards policy allows the integration of Open Source on equal footing with proprietary offerings.

But more: open standards are also a key element for service orientation and promoting innovation and choice and fostering competition. Open Standards provide a level basis on which to innovate. They allow everyone to compete fairly and on equal terms with new or better products and offerings. And they allow the seamless integration of technologies into an open architecture thus providing the space for innovative technologies and products to be made available to and driven by public authorities.

There is only one element on which this UK procurement policy could be more clear: that is the focus on software interoperability. While this is obvious from the context it is not entirely clear in the text.

Nonetheless, this procurement policy is a major step forward in a leading Member State of the EU. The UK government shows strong leadership with this. I am sure this will create an impressive drive for eGovernment and government transformation in the UK and far beyond.

Relevant link of today: NYT article on public procurement in Europe

2011-01-27T10:01:00.001+01:00

Interesting article in the New York Times on recent discussions in Europe on public procurement:

"European Commission of Two Minds on Software Purchases?
"By KEVIN J. O'BRIEN
"Published: January 26, 2011

"BERLIN — The European Commission, which last month urged governments across the Continent to develop computer systems that communicate better with one another, is itself considering extending its use of Microsoft software products that the company’s critics say are incompatible with other systems. [...] "

The full article is available online on the NYT website. An interesting and thought provoking aspect on which the article touches is that exit cost need to be calculated into the total cost whenever a decision about software is made.

100 years of IBM - nice clip on IBM's centennial

2011-01-21T10:45:00.000+01:00

IBM celebrates its centennial this year. The clip below nicely shows IBM's remarkable history of innovation and success - and bridges the achievements into the future with new challenges ahead to build a smarter planet. After all, that's what's important in such a year where a company like IBM gets 100 years old: build on the past, but work towards the future and towards continued innovation that matters for making things better. Enjoy ....

Smarter work means effective collaboration – but mind you: interoperability matters

2011-01-18T15:58:00.002+01:00

I had an interesting experience the other day. A colleague from some other organisation proposed to me to use some collaboration space they set up. For sure I agreed – great, I believe in collaboration and think that collaborative and open development of documents and sharing information makes our life easier and drives innovation.

What I did not know when agreeing, though, was that these guys had implemented Microsoft Sharepoint. The look and feel of it is not bad, that's true, but the stuff lacks interoperability in key aspects. This means it “works best” if you use Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer etc. Or more precisely: it is designed to lock-in people into Microsoft technology.

Well, I use a Linux desktop – an open client that is not only very powerful, but also very fast and reliable and does not get slower and bigger every day I use it but stays efficient and fast. And I use Lotus Symphony as office suit – the IBM implementation of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard.

The result was that Sharepoint failed to provide the required interoperability and I could not use some of the key functions for collaboration. I could, for instance, not simply check out a document and edit it but had to save it locally first, then it automatically added some version tracking number so that the document name changed; moreover the formatting change marks and highlighting could not reliably be shared; document formatting got screwed up; etc.

When struggling with the tool the following dialogue box popped up saying "'Edit document' requires a Windows SharePoint-services compatible application and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher."

In other words, this is very much lock-in and far from reliable and efficient collaboration. It makes your life more complicated. It only seems to work fine if you use the full stack of proprietary software offered by one single vendor and does deprive you of flexibility and choice.

For sure, there are more cleverly designed collaboration tools around to use. Ones that allow openness and that provide interoperability to the utmost level. When I collaborate I want to be able to do so with anyone regardless of the technology they chose to use. It is like using the telephone – when I want to talk on the phone I want to be able to speak to anybody regardless of which phone provider or which hand-set supplier they chose.

To me this is yet another example of the high importance of interoperability and of using open standards for software interoperability. It is key for collaboration - and for promoting innovation.

Relevant link of today: NYT report on study that sees Firefox as leading browser in Europe

2011-01-05T10:23:00.000+01:00

There is an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about Firefox having become the leading browser in Europe:

"For the first time in a decade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is no longer the leading Web browser in Europe, ceding the position to Mozilla’s Firefox, an Irish research company that tracks Web use said on Tuesday.

"While three research companies also active in the field disputed the finding, StatCounter, a company in Dublin, said Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer as the top European browser in December, with a 38.1 percent share, compared with Explorer’s 37.5 percent."

See the full article in the online edition of the NYT.

The new European Interoperability Framework (EIF) – the attempt of an interpretation

2011-01-04T15:40:00.000+01:00

It is a typical phenomenon of political and societal revolutions that they are followed by some period of restoration. This was the case with the English Civil War and Revolution of the 1640s leading to the assassination of Charles I. in 1649; the Restoration brought Charles II. and James II. into place – until again the Stuarts were kicked out in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It was the case with the French Revolution of 1789 which eventually evolved into the Napoleonic Empire and later on into the Bourbon Restoration. And it can also be seen by the 1968 revolution of young people everywhere in the Western world that was followed by some restoration and consolidation in the 1980s up until recently. Sometimes the restoration is more radical and drastical. Sometimes it is more kind of a consolidation and conciliation. Yet, the basic mentalities and ideas that had led to the revolutionary actions always prevailed and on the long run led to drastic changes of states, governments and societies.

Don't worry, I'm not going to write a history of the world here. Yet, the analogy stroke me and I was wondering in how far it applies when reading the new version of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) which was published by the European Commission shortly before Christmas as annex 2 to the Communication “Towards interoperability for European public services” (COM(2010) 744). Annex 1 is the higher level European Interoperability Strategy document (EIS).

The EIF v1 as published by the Commission in 2004 was revolutionary. I said so before in various blog entries. It courageously pushed for openness for pan-European eGovernment services taking a strong stance on open standards and promoting open source to be treated on equal footing with proprietary offerings. It had enormous impact within Europe and beyond, inspiring a lot of national interoperability frameworks and policy making worldwide. In other words: it set the scene of what modern requirements on eGovernment infrastructures and on software interoperability in general need to be.

Naturally, EIF v1 also caught a good many players by surprise, most of all those who were not yet ready to operate within the new general paradigm of openness, who were not yet ready to transform and adapt some new equilibrium between openness and proprietary. And for half a dozen years a heavy, sometimes battle-like debate followed – including a lot of nonsense and FUD that were spread.

Now the new EIF in combination with the Communication and the EIS is a clever and an extremely balanced document. It is certainly not revolutionary at all. It does not attempt to pursue new horizons, nor move to the next level of interoperability and openness. But it is not a manifestation of a tough restoration, either. It is more a conciliation. For sure, it makes a lot of concessions to those who did attack the EIF v1 and thus moves a step back from the former revolutionary spirit. Yet, it provides a basis to move on effectively with the implementation and realization of interoperability in the area of eGovernment services after all these years of battling and debate. Thus it has the potential to prevent a period of restoration, to prevent the risk of turning back time and of lost years. It has the potential to manoeuvre the issue of eGovernment interoperability into more settled waters, yet keep the momentum and eventually drive the technical implementation.

Looking at the new EIF in a bit more detail I'd like to follow on three aspects:

Openness:
The new EIF makes a good many concessions in this respect. The strong stance on openness that characterised EIF v1 has been attenuated. The term open standard, so widely used by industry and governments worldwide, is no longer used in the EIF. Instead it now talks about “formalised specifications”. And the strong requirement for Royalty-free licensing has been changed and also FRAND is now mentioned as being appropriate provided that the implementation in open source is possible. But there is no explicit chapter on Open Source and its use and benefit for eGovernment and the public sector in general.

At the same time, however, the notion of openness is reinforced. It is seen as a very broad basic principle for public services. There is the clear recommendation for public services to “aim for openness” (Recommendation 6 of the EIF). And very correctly the EIF mentions the example of the internet and world wide web and the positive effect open specifications (in other words: open standards) have had in this context. Hence recommendation 22 continues along the lines of openness stressing that “when establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support”. And the EIF proposes that public authorities should apply objective criteria including openness when selecting specifications and standards and cooperate with the respective communities in case of standardisation gaps.

A further aspect of openness is technology, or better: product neutrality. Here also the EIF is very strong in requiring that “Public administrations should not impose any specific technological solution on citizens, businesses and other administrations when establishing European public services” (Recommendation 7).

Interoperability:
The new EIF puts very strong emphasis on interoperability. Compared to EIF v1 it has extended the scope of interoperability to further levels like legal and organisational interoperability. It stresses the importance of standards and specifications for interoperability and puts that in a clear context. Even though it makes some concessions when talking about exceptional support of competing specifications (section 5.1) and about “interoperability facilitators” (section 3.2.1.2). But it leaves no doubt that “Public administrations, when establishing European public services, should base interoperability agreements on existing formalised specifications, or, if they do not exist, cooperate with communities working in the same areas” (Recommendation 20).

This, by the way, also emphasises the need for European public authorities to use specifications from fora/consortia and to cooperate with such bodies developing global open standards. In this respect the EIF supports the general strategy as expressed in the Commission Communication (and in the EU Digital Agenda) regarding “the rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards […] and on providing guidance to the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in” (Communication – section 3.1).

Service orientation:
The new EIF takes a major step forward in requiring “a component-based service model” for European public services (Recommendation 9). SOAs are state-of-the-art technology that benefits from interoperability and the use of open standards, promotes fair competition as well as the possibility for continuous improvement and extension and thus fosters competitiveness and innovation. Therefore, the new EIF puts a strong focus on open infrastructures and architectures as a base requirement for eGovernment implementations. Again, this is made very clear in the Commission Communication where it is said that the EIF lays down “the concept of interoperability agreements, based on standards and open platforms” (Communication – section 3.1).

In my opinion, these three aspects above show that the new EIF together with the Commission Communication and the EIS provide a round framework for moving ahead with eGovernment public services in Europe. No doubt, they provide some level of consolidation. But this might exactly be what is needed after the years of debate.

The new EIF is certainly not a manifestation of some turn-around restoration – to take up my starting point again. Far from it. It is very clever by conceding that there might be exceptional cases where full openness or genuine interoperability might not be able to achieve straight away. But it is firm in sticking to the key original “revolutionary” principle of openness – which is even extended. And the new EIF complements this basic principle with relevant new aspects, most notably in the areas of interoperability and of service orientation.

What is important now is the implementation of the new EIF European-wide, to walk to talk. In my opinion, and in addition to the actions listed in the documents, this means the establishment and execution of some key actions. Here's an initial list of four that come to my mind:

1. Drive the development and implementation of open infrastructures for public services which may require the necessary re-engineering of processes.

2. Ensure that the legal framework in Europe is modernised for ICT by allowing the direct use and referencing of fora and consortia standards provided that they meet a certain set of openness criteria.

3. In the context of the EIF and public services, include interoperability, or even better: demonstrated interoperability, as a key requirement in EU policy making and public procurement.

4. In the context of the EIF and public services, foster the implementation of open specifications with multiple implementations on the market place by referencing them in public procurement and in EU policies.

This new EIF provides the proper framework for a boost of public services. Some national interoperability frameworks are already available to complement the higher level EIF with concrete national actions. In 2011 the time has come now to take a quantum leap and move on to more and better public services in Europe.

Tensions between IPRs and ICT standardisation – Need for action on all sides

2010-11-25T14:30:00.000+01:00

On Monday this week I attended the workshop jointly organised by the European Commission and the European Patent Office (EPO) on “Tensions between Intellectual Property Rights and the ICT standardisation process: reasons and remedies”. It was a very interesting conference with an impressive set of speakers. Regarding the agenda this conference built nicely on the one on IPRs and ICT standardisation of November 2008 looking more closely and some of the issues that had then been identified.

Very briefly, I noted the following seven points as key items coming out of the discussion. They are all very important and I consider this an excellent result of the conference:

Problem areas do exist and there is need for action both from public authorities, from standards bodies and from the EPO.
Progress is made in several organisations regarding improved IPR databases and the collaboration with EPO on this. The ETSI DARE project for restructuring the ETSI database was given as a prime example.
The EU patent would be a significant step forward. It is also one example for government action.
The concept of a License of Right is worth pursuing. It would be viable method for ensuring the availability of patents for standardisation. There were several supporter of this in different panels.
The topic of ex ante declaration of licensing terms remains disputed. Yet, there seems to be a dividing line between software standardisation on the one hand and telecommunication on the other hand.
Regarding open source the key issue is not to use and implement open source technologies in proprietary offerings but it is for open source communities to implement standards that are available only at FRAND terms.
The idea for a Software Interoperability Directive was brought forward that governs that standards for software interoperability should be available under terms and conditions that allow their implementation in open source.

There was one presentation that – to my mind – did not quite fit into the respective panel but that was interesting for for another reason. A gentleman representing a consortium (that he several times called himself a “club”) explained that this “club” produced a specification and then collaborated with Cenelec for transposing it into an EN. So far so good. But the representative clearly stated that his consortium, which is a for-profit organisation, uses this standard for doing certifications. This is frightening and, in fact, in my mind to some extend an abuse of standardisation. This example once again illustrates the justification of the requirement for Open Standards that they are developed in non-profit organisations.

The Commission and EPO announced that they are going for a follow-on conference next year with a focus on the international dimension which as not covered by the agenda this time.

I believe that this Monday's conference, however, produced already a number of results that are critical items and that the Commission and EPO will start working on right away. My seven points above might give an indicator of those critical items. And perhaps some intermediate results can already be presented at the conference next year.

A further outcome, out of my perspective, is that the issues identified are not crucial for the revision of the European standardisation system that has been ongoing since 2006 and is supposed to be finalised by mid 2011. And I'd like to repeat: the ICT sector is in urgent need of reforms concerning the EU ICT standardisation policy as proposed in the Commission's ICT White Paper of 2009.

Open Standards for eGovernance

2010-11-18T13:36:00.000+01:00

For more than half a decade Europe has played a leading role globally in defining framework conditions for eGovernment services provision. The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) version 1.0 was a breakthrough document in this respect. Essentially, it set three clear directions:

Openness must be a key principle in eGovernance;
eGovernment services must be built on Open Standards and the term Open Standards was clearly defined;
Open Source needs to be considered on equal footing with proprietary offerings.

These rules and directions should not come as a surprise to anyone. eGovernance and eGovernment services are – bluntly speaking – about the internet, about offering citizens and businesses information and services over the internet. Openness governs the internet and the web and Open Standards are at the core of it. Industry has broadly agreed on the respective open conditions in the relevant global standards bodies such as W3C, IETF or OASIS that deliver Open Standards.

The EIF 1.0 has had a huge positive effect. It triggered the development of National Interoperability Frameworks in the EU Member States following the basic directions of the EIF regarding openness and interoperability. And EIF 1.0 influenced other countries and regions outside the EU. They followed Europe's leadership in developing open frameworks. In this respect, EIF 1.0 has been a very successful document with strong global impact.

Now last week India adopted its “Policy on Open Standards for eGovernment”. It follows the same principles as the EIF 1.0. And the Indian Policy also gives a clear definition of the characteristics of an Open Standard:

“An Identified Standard will qualify as an “Open Standard”, if it meets the following criteria:
4.1.1 Specification document of the Identified Standard shall be available with or without a nominal fee.
4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard.
4.1.3 Identified Standard shall be adopted and maintained by a not-for-profit organization, wherein all stakeholders can opt to participate in a transparent, collaborative and consensual manner.
4.1.4 Identified Standard shall be recursively open as far as possible.
4.1.5 Identified Standard shall have technology-neutral specification.
4.1.6 Identified Standard shall be capable of localization support, where applicable, for all Indian official Languages for all applicable domains.” (p. 2)

In addition, the Indian Policy contains some provisions in case Open Standards are not available for a given purpose so that, for instance, “RAND-based” standards can be used for some time. This is pretty reasonable; yet, the default is for Open Standards.

I very much like the clarity, simplicity and the straight-forward approach of the Indian Policy. It provides a proper framework and thus creates a clear basis for everyone to operate on. Like with the EIF 1.0 this framework builds on the common practice of the internet and the world wide web and the Open Standards used there. And its scope is clearly on eGovernment services. Nobody needs to be surprised by it; nobody needs to be afraid of it.

Reading this Indian Policy, though, makes me wonder once again what the debate about the revision of the EIF that has been ongoing for almost 3 years is actually about. The apparent attempts to delete the clear commitment to openness from a revised EIF seem to be more than anachronistic looking both at National Interoperability Frameworks and at other regions in the world like India but also looking at the common practice applied in the context of the world wide web. In effect, Europe blocks itself from moving ahead in implementing eGovernment solutions and delivering interoperable eGovernment services to the citizens and businesses in Europe. And we witness how other regions pass by following the very principles that EIF 1.0 had laid down have a dozen years ago.

Commission announces EU standardisation reform for early 2011 – Communication on industrial policy

2010-10-31T22:43:00.001+01:00

Last Friday the European Commission published its next Communication for one of the flagships initiatives under the Europe 2020 strategy – the Communication on “An Integrated Industrial Policy for the Globalisation Era: Putting Competitiveness and Sustainability at Centre Stage” (COM(2010) 614). It was prepared under the leadership of DG Enterprise and is available at the DG ENTR website.

I gave it a first quick reading over the weekend – focussing on the passages and statements where standardisation and innovation are addressed. This means, for sure, in particular chapter 4.4 that is explicitly dedicated to standardisation.

This section on standardisation seems to have been drafted very carefully in order not to create any further uproar or protest with anybody – we all know the noise that was made against any reform over the last months. This has the downside that the text remains very high level and does not go much into detail. For “early 2011” the Commission commits to “present through a standardisation communication and legislative proposal a strategy to promote a stronger role for European standard setting in a rapidly changing world and society” (p. 12).

Regarding the ICT sector the Communication outlines that one aspect for change is the “rapid adoption of the best available global standards, where global standard making practices are well established such as in the ICT sector” (p. 12). This is surprisingly unspecific given the outstanding work DG ENTR has done on modernising the ICT standardisation policy in the EU since the start of the ICT Study which continued into the development of the recommendations that are laid down in the ICT White Paper of 2009 and that have broad support from industry across all sectors. The key messages on the needs of the ICT sector for reform of European standardisation were reconfirmed in the Digital Agenda – and quite frankly I would have expected them to be more clearly stated in the Communication on industrial policy, as well. After all, global, open ICT standards are of critical relevance for an effective industrial and innovation policy in Europe. For almost of all of the “big issues” that are listed and where standardisation can be of critical relevance global ICT standards from so called fora and consortia, above all the internet standards, are indispensable. There is simply no way to realise a smart grid without using TCP/IP, HTML, XML, and many such like.

The issue of fora or consortia standards is not addressed in this document. It addresses standardisation at European, international or national level. In addition, the document claims that “markets themselves often generate factual standards through technological leadership, market agreements, and/or market dominance” (p. 11). I believe the term “factual standards” – similar to “de facto” standards – is not clear enough here. It puts global open standards from well-established organisations (fora/consortia) on the same level like proprietary technologies with huge market dominance. Quite frankly, the latter should be totally out when talking about standards and standardisation.

The general direction which is given on standardisation is very good:

“For the manufacturing industries, the overall goal in the decade to come is to develop a standards system for Europe that will meet the expectations of both the market players and European public authorities. This needs to be achieved in a rapidly changing world and society, and should preferably also promote European influence beyond the single market in the globalised economy.” (p. 12)

What is not quite clear to me is why this statement is limited to the “manufacturing industries” – to me this is too much a limitation given the fact that economies are increasingly adopting post-industrial structures and are transforming into globally integrated economies where standardisation plays a key role on the level of process innovation and in the integration of technologies for developing smarter solutions for the things we do. It is exactly this role of standardisation that is of high importance on the context of sustainability. This is very clearly seen and addressed in the section on innovation:

“Improved use of ICT for industrial competitiveness, resource optimisation and innovation will be essential for future competitiveness too, as set out in the Europe 2020 flagship on the Digital Agenda. […] a more innovative use of ICT throughout industrial value chains needs to be encouraged to streamline business transactions for example by e-invoicing, and boost overall competitiveness through demonstration projects” (pp. 12-13).

Earlier in the document the Commission already addresses the topic of services and announces “set up a High Level Group on Business Services to examine market gaps, standards and innovation and international trade issues in industries such as such as [sic!] logistics, facility management, marketing and advertising (2012)” (p.9). This is very worth supporting. The services sector is clearly a growth sector for Europe with an enormous potential for further innovation and growth. This, by the way, again includes the ICT sector. Think, for instance, of all the SMEs across Europe that build their business on the internet – o providing services related to the world wide web. In this way, they very much benefit from using global open standards and from innovating on the level of the use and implementation of these standards.

Finally, I'd like to point at the passages dealing with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). The Commission very clearly says: “Improvements in the European system of intellectual property rights are essential and long overdue, especially an effective EU Patent and patent litigation system.” (p. 9). No doubt, the EU Patent would be a major achievement. The Commission continues to outline that proper enforcement of IPRs is also necessary and touches on the negative effects of piracy and counterfeiting. What is not yet addressed in this Communication but what I think will have to be considered soon in this decade when talking about IPRs are aspects of open innovation, of flexible IPR systems that allow for different rules to be chosed in different contexts, of crowd sourcing and open source development, etc. Again, business models are changing and collaboration and co-creation are increasing – at least in certain areas. These are new challenges to the patent system. In the ICT sector they are vital already and have led to a very differentiated view on IPRs, e.g. by concluding that standards in the area of software interoperability should be available on a Royalty-free basis and under such terms and conditions that allow open source to use and implement them.

As I said in the beginning, this is a first snapshot on my side only after briefly reading through the Communication. The document is extremely rich and contains a lot of details – and thus provides a large amount of food for thought.

Broad consensus on the need for ICT standardisation reform in order to promote innovation

2010-10-29T13:57:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday this week I was invited as a speaker at a breakfast briefing of the European Internet Foundation on “The Role of Standards in Promoting Innovation”. The second speaker this morning was Antti Peltomaki, Deputy Director General of DG INFSO.

The event was absolutely impressive. Very well organised by the European Internet Foundation and very kindly introduced and hosted by Mme Catherine Trautmann, MEP. It was a lively discussion with two short and crisp introductory speeches from Mr Peltomaki and myself. No slides were shown. I had a slide deck prepared that the European Internet Foundation kindly handed out to all participants – I posted it on slideshare and you can browse through it below.

1010eif standardisation and innovation jfriedrich final

View more presentations from Jochen Friedrich.

Essentially I made three points in my introductory speech:

First, I talked about the different types of innovation in relation to standardisation: Bringing some basic new technology into a standard on the one hand. Versus innovating by making use of standards, by putting innovative solutions and technologies – intelligence layers – on top of standards based infrastructures, on the other hand. These different aspects need to be kept in mind when talking about effective innovation policy since they require different approaches, e.g. to IPR requirements.

Secondly, I elaborated on the importance of open standards in the area of software interoperability for fostering innovation. The world wide web, global integration and solutions for a smarter planet and for eco-efficiency are key examples here. And the integration of technologies and the combination of standards provide a huge potential for innovation and are key for promoting and driving such innovations. They should, therefore, be high on the agenda of the Commission when dealing with industrial policy.

And thirdly, I outlined that what is important is that relevant global open standards are available for use and implementation in Europe. This, for sure, touches on the current political reform agenda of the Commission. A large amount of highly relevant standards in ICT is developed by global fora and consortia. No ICT-system can be implemented without these fora/consortia standards. And it is, therefore, important that the recommendations made by the Commission in the ICT White Paper – and reconfirmed in the Digital Agenda – are implemented. These complementary changes to the European Standardisation System will allow the direct referencing of fora/consortia standards in EU policies and public procurement on a strict by-need basis and subject to a case-by-case assessment of the respective fora/consortia standards against a set of openness criteria as outlined in the ICT White Paper.

As mentioned above we had a very good and constructive discussion. There was full consensus that the changes proposed by the Commission in the ICT White Paper need to be implemented. Mr Peltomaki also had this in his speech as vital for the Digital Agenda.

Two people also made comments about the term “open standards” and whether to use it. In my opinion, it is a term widely used in the market place, its concepts have broadly been adopted by leading ICT standards bodies (fora/consortia) e.g. in the area of the internet, and it is used by many national governments in their policies and interoperability frameworks throughout Europe and beyond. So not taking notice of the term and concept won't work – and won't gain credibility. It is important to clearly differentiate in what contexts open standards are important – as, for instance, when we talk about software interoperability where open standards are essential for promoting innovation.

Interoperability was key topic at EU Digital Agenda Stakeholder Day

2010-10-29T12:08:00.000+02:00

On Monday this week I participated in the EU Digital Agenda Stakeholder Day organised by DG INFSO. To begin with, this was a real workshop – and that's why I said participated above rather than attended. The point is: you could not just attend, you had to participate. The organisers had outlined this beforehand in the methodology for the workshop which was published on the Digital Agenda website. Participants had to move around, discuss the various proposals that had been submitted a while before the conference, had to convince others about their proposals, had to vote and select the top projects. This is what took place in the morning sessions. The afternoon then was dedicated to presenting the top projects to the Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Vice-President Neelie Kroes and the Director-General of DG INFSO, Robert Madelin.

I liked this set up and methodology very much and I should say it was extremely successful. It really made people move and get engaged. It provided the proper disruptions that are needed to stifle creativity and innovative thinking. And after some warming up amongst all participants my impression was that everybody well accommodated to the workshop and its methodology.

Regarding the proposals that were submitted and discussed during the day, what was astonishing to me was the pervasive agreement on the high importance of interoperability. I would say in more than every second project proposal interoperability was a key element. This shows that its critical values are widely acknowledged and seen – interoperability is of high importance for fostering innovating, competitiveness and growth. And this naturally goes together with standards – open standards – that are an indispensable enabling force for interoperability.

Regarding the actual project proposals some were really interesting. Personally I took a lot of interest in the proposal on driving the use and development of standards around public sector information. This proposal even made it to the round of the top projects that were presented in the afternoon. I also liked the idea about making public procurement more transparent and driving that open standards and interoperability are major requirements in public procurement while referencing of specific products should not be a reality anymore. And I liked one project proposing the elaboration and implementation of an OASIS standard for reaching a meta-identifier working across the sectoral, vertical identifiers as used, for instance, in SWIFT, ODETTE, etc. This could really help in cross-sectoral eBusiness.

The stars at the end of the event were two guys who argued for better conditions in Europe for supporting young, digital entrepreneurs. Their cause is totally right. For my personal gusto they were a bit too critical about Europe. I know a lot of digital entrepreneurs who are very good and successful in Europe, e.g. in the region where I live. There are many such similar success stories of SMEs in Europe that have started around the internet and have very successfully established on the market. We should not forget about them in such debates.

To sum it all up: the Digital Agenda Stakeholder Day was, in my opinion, a very successful event. Very thought provoking and inspiring. I am curious to see the further results coming out of it.

EU Parliament to adopt report from the IMCO Committee on the Future of European Standardisation

2010-10-20T23:37:00.002+02:00

Tomorrow, October 21, the European Parliament will discuss the report produced by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) on the Future of European Standardisation. The document is was recently adopted by the IMCO Committee and is available both on the IMCO website and on the agenda for the Parliament for tomorrow. Both listings also contain the Opinion of the ITRE Committee (Committee on Industry, Technology and Research) which is very worth reading and in several instances more straight and forward looking than the full IMCO report.

A couple of weeks ago I commented on the draft version that had been published by IMCO in mid August listing some issues that I still saw missing from the report – most notably around the specifics of the ICT sector.

Now the final report has much improved in this respect and takes full account of the specifics and the needs of the ICT sector in addition to the broad and impressively concise perspective taken on European standardisation at large. In general the report is overly balanced. It addresses all stakeholder interests as well as the different sectors and the processes that have developed within the sectors for developing standards and specifications. Perhaps with one exception: I find that ETSI comes a bit short in the report. But clause G clearly mentions the different processes that are part of the European Standardisation System in its totality including direct membership in ETSI.

Out of my perspective I see a number of items in the report that are particularly worth noting:

1. The different structures in ICT standardisation require action:

The Committee clearly identifies the different structures and processes in the ICT sector where a large amount of standards is developed in global open fora and consortia. And IMCO stresses the relevance of these fora/consortia standards for innovation as well as for interoperability which, in turn, again is a trigger for innovation. (clauses 64-67). In its recommendations the Committee puts a clear emphasis on improving the cooperation between fora/consortia and the formal standards organisations. Yet, the Committee also clearly “welcomes the Commission white paper on ‘Modernising ICT Standardisation in the EU – The Way Forward’; calls on the Member States and the Commission to implement the key recommendations outlined in the white paper” (clause 6). It supports the set of attributes that is proposed in the ICT White Paper (clause 8). And it “Stresses the imperative need to adapt ICT standardisation policy to market and policy developments, which will lead to achieving important European policy goals requiring interoperability” (clause 67).

It is interesting to compare the sometimes a bit obscure and circuitous wording of the IMCO report with the Opinion of the ITRE Committee which is much clearer and more to the point. The ITRE Committee gives two clear directions on how to proceed:

“27. Calls on the Commission to introduce into the legal framework the possibility of referring, solely in the field of ICT and solely on the condition of compliance with certain basic standardisation principles, to deliverables of fora and consortia;
[...]
36. Calls on the Commission to put in place a mechanism for recognising specific standards developed by industry fora and consortia which could have a significant impact on filling standardisation gaps and on international cooperation in ICT standardisation matters;”

Taking both the IMCO report and the ITRE opinion together rounds up the picture and gives the right direction where to go.

2. Correlation between standards, interoperability, innovation and competitiveness:

The report leaves no doubt that standards are essential for interoperability and both are an important trigger for innovation and competitiveness. Thus, the Committee “recognises that interoperability is key to innovation and competitiveness, especially in the ICT sector” (clause 66).

3. Short but clear statement regarding IPRs:

Clause 63 touches on IPRs in relation to standardisation as well as innovation. What I like is that the Committee keeps this short. IPR is a complex topic and can easily overshadow any discussion on standardisation. The Committee concentrates on the right issues: First, there are different aspects that need to be considered in the debate, namely whether the focus is on the transfer of basic research into standardisation for technology exploitation and market access or whether it is on the availability of standards for use, implementation and innovation on top of the standards. And secondly the Committee clearly states that care needs to be taken when using proprietary technologies to make sure that they are available later on to all users. What is perhaps missing in this respect is a consideration of Open Source and its needs. After all, Open Source technologies are of high relevance to the public sector.

4. Modernisation of processes is needed:

The Committee is very clear on the need for the National Standards Bodies and the ESOs to review their processes and drastically increase the use of modern ICT technologies for a modernisation of the way they work and operate. They see the opportunities this will bring for more openness and transparency, for better stakeholder involvement – including above all SMEs and societal stakeholders. And I would like to add to this: standards bodies should use standards based solutions when moving into this direction.

5. The power of public procurement:

It is only a short mention in clause 58 but it is of utmost importance: public procurement needs to use standards “in order to improve the quality of public services and foster innovative technologies”. I ignore the fact that there is a bit patriotism included in the clause as it only talks about “European standards”. This raises the questions of what is a European standard, what about international standards, what about fora/consortia standards etc. Nonetheless, public procurement is a powerful element of governments to drive the implementation and use of standards and thus to ensure interoperability and drive innovation and competitiveness.

So far the points I would like to highlight in the report out of my very personal perspective. Now there are also some aspects where I think the report could be improved.

First, I already indicated above that I think the report is in general a bit too conservative – meaning protectionist of the current system. If I may say so, some passages read as if nightmares of a complete overhaul of the European standardisation system had haunted the respective authors. While I fully share the basic position that the European standardisation system works well and has entirely fulfilled its purpose and function over the last two decades, above all in supporting the internal market, I also see that modern times require some adaptions and changes. Only at one point, for instance, does the report mention globalisation (clause I), which, however, is a major challenge for Europe and for European standardisation as well as a major driver for change.

The report overemphasises the preservation of the current structures. What I am missing is some forward-looking on flexibility and changes that might be needed for the future system in Europe. Not that I would expect the Parliament to come up with the exact proposals for such changes. But the report should have identified the need and given directions to the Commission and the Member States to consider such aspects.

Secondly, there seems to be a general assumption in the report as if standardisation and standards bodies were a governmental institution. Standardisation is above all for the market, and standards bodies are tools for market players to develop the standards the market needs. The element of developing and using standards in support of regulation is, compared to that, fairly small. On the other hand, this is the part of standardisation where public authorities are concerned. But it could have been made clearer in the report that there is a broader aspect of standardisation and this is the market.

And thirdly a final point where I believe some improvement could be made: the report entirely avoids the term “Open Standard”. Yet, “Open Standard” is such a powerful and widely used concept in the global market as well as widely used term adopted in various policies throughout Europe and beyond that it should at least be mentioned at some point to show that the Committee has taken notice of its existence and has given it some reflection.

For tomorrow, I expect that the Parliament will not hold any debate on this report but in a straight forward voting adopt it. That's also what the agenda indicates. And after all, the report is good. It was accepted by a broad majority as was the ITRE opinion in the ITRE Committee. And it provides a very comprehensive basis for the further processes around the reform of the European Standardisation System.

Conference on Green IT - showing the relevance of open standards in the market place and for innovation policy

2010-10-13T17:48:00.001+02:00

As I had blogged earlier in expectation of this conference on Green IT which is co-organised by the Belgian EU presidency and OASIS this is a great manifestation of the benefits Open Standards have in the market place. Open Standards drive innovation and competitiveness, enable SOAs and are, therefore, essential for the development of sustainable solutions in creating a smarter planet.

And, indeed, the first speeches and panel sessions confirmed exactly this. Open Standards, collaboration are key. And even in areas like security the expert on the panel very clearly said that if you think to reach security by obscurity you are misguided.

I also touched on this issue in my presentation given in the first panel which was on developing open standards in support of sustainability.

1010oasis green it j_friedrich

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Open Standards are a reality in the market place – OASIS conference on Green IT

2010-10-11T19:10:00.000+02:00

Open Standards are still a controversial issue. See, for instance, the debate around the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) where opponents to the concept of Open Standards for software interoperability in the area of eGovernment have been lobbying for years with highest intensity. This discussion is largely held on a theoretical level and with a lot of emotion.

In my opinion the dispute is largely strange and off the facts of reality. Open Standards are successfully applied in the market place everywhere. Most notably, the internet would not have become what it is today – with all its effects on innovation and growth – without Open Standards. And many future tasks we are facing will be tackled with the support of Open Standards.

I think it's time to overcome this strange debate whether Open Standards are bad or good and whether the term can be used or should be banned. Perhaps the conference that takes place in Brussels this week can help in this respect. It is a conference on Green IT organised by the Belgian EU presidency in cooperation with the standards body OASIS. And it is exactly on the point where Open Standards benefit for sustainability and more intelligent and smarter ways of doing things.

I have hopes that this conference can shed some light on areas where Open Standards are applied and implemented and where they drive progress and trigger innovative ways of integrating technologies and improving processes. Everybody looking at the conference programme will easily see that Open Standards can't be overlooked. OASIS and other standards bodies in the area of software interoperability, the internet and process interoperability develop Open Standards. And the great thing is everybody uses them. And everybody gains in competitiveness – be it large, mult-national companies or small and medium sized enterprises.

For Europe the EIF in its version 1.0 had recognised the benefits of Open Standards and provided an good definition of what Open Standards are. See also my blog post from last week on this. And many national policy makers in Europe and abroad had followed and included the concept and the requirement for Open Standards into their National Interoperability Frameworks.

I am sure the conference on Green IT this week will prove them right by showing the practical side of Open Standards. And it will provide some good arguments for integrating the concept of Open Standards into the overall ICT standardisation framework for Europe which is currently under review. It doesn't all have to be Open Standards. But there are many policy areas where Open Standards make sense – above all where software interoperability is concerned (again: like with the internet). This is what policy makers are rightly seeing. And by using the powerful concept of Open Standards in their policies they create a good deal of drive and act as great pacesetters.

The high impact standardisation makes for fostering innovation - European Commission Communication on the Innovation Union

2010-10-08T11:56:00.001+02:00

On Wednesday this week the European Commission published a Communication on the Innovation Union which is one of the Europe 2020 Flagship Initiatives. This flagship initiative is led by Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn who also presented the Communication. The document is available with some further introductory notes and links to the respective press conference on the website of DG Research.

In my opinion this Communication is a very good document. Regarding standardisation it addresses a wide range of aspects where standards are relevant for innovation. And it touches on and identifies some key issues that exist with European standardisation today:

“If not able to adapt, the European standardisation system risks becoming irrelevant with companies turning instead to other instruments (as could be seen in the ICT sector) or worse could start to work as a brake on innovation. A dynamic standardisation system is also a pre-condition for the EU to maintain and further reinforce its impact on the setting of standards at global level, where other countries are increasingly seeking to set the rules.” (p. 16)

I personally think this general criticism is a bit too harsh. The European standardisation system is not bad at all. It's basic structures are working fine and it has worked very well in supporting the development of harmonised standards for the European common market. Nonetheless, it is true that the system requires some reform. It needs to be more flexible for reacting to global developments. And for the ICT sector it needs mechanisms for allowing specifications from fora and consortia that meet a certain set of openness criteria to be used and implemented in Europe, i.e. to be available for direct referencing in EU policies and in public procurement.

This urgent need of ICT is, in fact, addressed in the Communication as well with a re-confirmation on the ICT standardisation reform – committed now for “early 2011”:

“In early 2011, as a first step, the Commission will present a Communication accompanied by a legislative proposal on standardisation, which will inter alia cover the ICT sector, in order to speed up and modernise standard-setting to enable interoperability and foster innovation in fast-moving global markets. This will be combined with a multi-annual programme to anticipate new standardisation needs and integration of standards into R&D projects in the research Framework Programme.” (p. 17)

Open Standards from global ICT fora and consortia are so important for fostering innovation so that this reform is of highest relevance. Open Standards ensure interoperability and thus provide a trusted base on which innovation can take place by implementing the standards, integrating them and combining technologies for developing new, smarter solutions.

For being effective in fostering innovation, the availability and the conditions under which standards can be used are, for sure, key. The Commission has clearly recognised this and stresses that “standard setting processes require clear IPR rules to avoid situations where a company can gain unfair market power by incorporating proprietary IPRs in a standard” (p. 19). And the Commission makes the right level of differentiation that is needed on the one hand for providing incentives for contributing technologies to standardisation and on the other hand for having technologies available for exploitation and innovation:

“This means, in particular, offering equivalent protection of IPRs, open access to interoperable standards, nondiscriminatory public procurements, and removing other non-physical barriers to trade, in line with international requirements.” (p. 27)

The reference to public procurement is very good, as well, because this is where public authorities have an actual tool to promote innovative technologies based on standards and thus making active use of all the benefits from open standards. So “faster setting of interoperable standards and strategic use of our massive procurement budgets” (p. 3) is for sure the right angle to look at. This Communication is very promising in this respect and is certainly another extremely important step the Commission has taken within its flagship initiatives.

The big impact of the EIF on European competitiveness

2010-10-07T21:25:00.003+02:00

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) in its version 1.0 which was published more than half a decade ago has been a great success, no doubt. I have said so before and keep repeating it. With EIF v1.0 Europe took global leadership on interoperability. And on openness.

EIF v1.0 took a clear stance on open standards for eGovernment services with a straight forward open standards definition. And it was very clear on the high relevance of open source technologies for public authorities. Accordingly, open source should be able to compete on equal footing with proprietary offerings.

From my experience, EIF v1.0 has had a number of very positive effects – not only for interoperability, but for European economy in general:

Awareness: EIF v1.0 has created a wide awareness about the issues around eGovernment interoperability and openness. Many EU member states meanwhile created their national interoperability frameworks following the EIF v1.0. And the reach-out of the EIF goes far beyond the borders of Europe with several other countries following the basic EIF v1.0 principles.
Interoperability: EIF v1.0 has driven genuine interoperability and has helped to clearly identify issues and barriers for interoperability.
Innovation: With its strict open standards policy the EIF has provided a basic framework which fosters innovation by using and implementing the available standards.
Competition: By requiring open standards EIF v1.0 has created a basis for the design and procurement of technologies for eGovernment services that supports fair competition by all – including open source technology providers – and prevents vendor lock-in.
Competitiveness: EIF v1.0 has triggered many companies to start thinking about how to adapt to the new world of openness and which transformations to undergo for keeping competitive in a more open and globalised world.

The latter has largely been overlooked, I believe. EIF v1.0 has had an enormous effect on businesses and the economy in Europe in general. By acknowledging the new realities of openness in the EIF v1.0 it made companies re-think their strategies and business models. And several companies thus moved on and started a transformation process to be better equipped for competing in this new, globalised economy. They took up concepts like open innovation, developed a strategy towards open source with a good many of them even crowd sourcing work themselves.

A similar effect has been on governments - and especially the CIOs amongst them. The EIF v1.0 has been a pacesetter for government policy and process transformation. As a matter of fact, today more governments in Europe and beyond are better set up to operate in our modern world. They have adopted SOAs, have redesigned their systems and implemented open infrastructures that allow scaling, improving, and getting smarter and better. And they have adopted open procurement policies that help to increase competition and competitiveness, reduce cost and give a better chance for local SMEs and the huge number of highly successful Open Source companies in Europe to compete on fair ground.

SMEs in Europe also especially benefited from the aspect that the EIF v1.0 with its clear open standards, open source and open procurement policy promotes innovation. Open Standards give a chance to every market player to innovate and compete with their innovative technologies in the market place. Because open standards ensure interoperability and thus allow modular replacement of technologies against new, better, more innovative ones at low exit cost.

Yet, we are also all aware of the hostility with which some parties have been fighting the EIF v1.0. Their reasons are hard to understand. I believe there is a good deal of paranoia involved, coupled with pure protectionism and the hope that if openness is not recognised in the EIF, businesses could avoid it and keep trying selling silos to governments. Oh my goodness, are people really that naïve?

I never really understood why the Commission decided to go for a revision of the EIF v1.0. I cannot see anything in EIF v1.0 that needs to be revised. An update with some additions and further elements around architecture and infrastructure added would have been ok. And this was, in fact, what the first publicly available draft of the EIF v2.0 was about. It reconfirmed the basic principles of EIF v1.0 and complemented the document on the architectural side and by addressing additional levels of interoperability. And this first draft did not receive any major objections in the public consultation.

Since then I have seen several leaked documents where I don't understand the purpose and the objective any more. Openness was almost entirely taken out at some point. The term open standards is not used any more even though widely used in the market place as well as in public policies and national interoperability frameworks worldwide. Etc. An EIF in such a downsized way would be turned into a pretty useless document. I'm sure we can all imagine who would like to see that.

Then, recently, there were rumours that the latest draft that was accepted in pre-inter-services consultation contained relevant elements of openness again. This sounded comforting. Until a couple of days ago there are new rumours that the basic principles of the EIF that go re-inserted are under attack again.

Can you still follow? I couldn't blame you if you can't. Whatever the current status is – I still have hopes that the Commission will not give in to those who try to get back to “pre-modern” times and try to protect some old-fashioned, outdated way of making business. I still have hopes that the Commission will not allow that the revised European Interoperability Framework turns into a European Interoperability Failure 2.0.

The positive connotation of 2.0 alone, however, will not prevent that. EIF 1.0 was a product of courageous, forward-looking policy making. And the spirit of EIF 1.0 will certainly prevail. The Digital Agenda and the Innovation Union, for instance, continue along these lines. So let's not make EIF irrelevant in these important and challenging times. Europe can be more innovative than deleting what is the predominant concept of our times: openness. Openness most notably in the form of a clear open standards policy, of a commitment to considering open source on equal footing to proprietary offerings; and in the form of a clear open procurement policy. Such an EIF 2.0 would be able to build on the success of EIF 1.0 and further promote innovation and competitiveness in Europe.

Predicting the future – what's up for European standardisation in this decade until 2020

2010-09-28T10:24:00.000+02:00

I am currently reading an interesting essay from Elena Esposito on the fictionality of future realities (“La realtà della finzione nella società moderna” - available in German translation in the edition suhrkamp under the title “Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität”). Elena Esposito is professor at the University of Modena and Regio Emilia and one of the leading European sociologists in the tradition of Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. This essay is fascinating as it puts the rise of the novel as the increasingly predominant form of fiction in the 18^th century into relation with the developments in mathematics in the area of stochastics and calculus of probabilites at the same time. And it shows the element of fictionality in the predictions of what is going to happen and how high the likelihood is.

To me this essay is a bit like a disclaimer for a piece of work that I did last year in the context of my participation in EXPRESS – the expert panel on the revision of the European Standardisation System that had the task to develop recommendations for European standardisation with the horizon of 2020. As input to the discussion I had developed a so-called PEST analysis looking at the four key aspects of political, economic, social and technological challenges for standardisation in the new decade. And I tried to clearly align my analysis with some – as precise as possible – policy recommendations in the area of standardisation.

I received some encouraging feedback about this document. So I put it up on slide share.

J friedrich pest_outlook_2020

View more documents from Jochen Friedrich.

Happy to receive further feedback, criticism, whatsoever.

Any reactions?

Am I totally off track or would you share some of the predictions?

What am I missing?

European Parliament takes clear stance on openness in the context of completing the internal market

2010-09-24T11:35:00.001+02:00

Earlier this week the European Parliament finished its “Report on completing the internal market for e-commerce” (2010/2012(INI)). It is a very interesting document, very comprehensively addressing the full spectrum of electronic commerce in relation to the internal marekt – and definitely worth reading.

In this report, once again, the Parliament takes a very clear stance on openness as critical for the internal market in many ways. It acknowledges the "importance of open and neutral access to a high-speed internet connection, without which e-commerce would be impossible" (clause 43). And it asks the Commission "to work towards creating rules and standards" to overcome the "non-interoperability of software on commercial and social networking websites" (clause 47).

Very precisely the Parliament is clear on the need for open standards in the context of e-commerce. In clause 51 the Parliament expresses that it

“Believes that the development of, and support for, common, open technical and operational specifications and standards (for compatibility, interoperability, accessibility, security, logistics, delivery, etc.) will facilitate cross-border e-commerce by assisting consumers, especially vulnerable and inexperienced computer users, and by bridging the operational, technical, cultural and language barriers that exist between the various Member States;”

More specifically, the parliament clearly requires the use of an open standard in the area of document formats. As stated in clause 41 the parliament “Highlights the importance of an open document exchange format for electronic business interoperation and calls on the Commission to take concrete steps to support its emergence and spread”. For sure, the Open Document Format (ODF) standard which was developed by OASIS and approved by ISO (ISO/IEC 26300) is the standard available for use today. It has been implemented in multiple competing products and is demonstrating interoperability in real life on a daily basis.

Some statements in the document certainly require some more clarification and detailed specification. In general, however, I think this report is another milestone in the policy debate where Europe is taking leadership on openness and open standards acknowledging the benefits of openness for both societies and business. To some extend this complements the work the Commission successfully started years ago with the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) version 1.0 which recommends open standards for achieving pan-European, cross-border interoperability in eGovernment services.

Indeed, in all areas where software-to-software interoperability is concerned, open standards are critical for ensuring interoperability. They promote innovation in providing a trusted and open base for everyone to implement and use – and to innovate on top of. They are a basis for service oriented architectures and they prevent single-vendor lock-in, foster competition, allow choice and keep costs low – including most notably exit costs for technologies.

Report of the European Parliament's IMCO Committee on the “Future of European Standardisation”

2010-09-15T13:19:00.000+02:00

In late June I was invited by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) of the European to a hearing on European standardisation – see my blog entry on the event. This was part of the Committee's work on a report on the “Future of European Standardisation (2010/2051(INI))”.

The draft report as put together by Edvard Kožušní k, the rapporteur, has been available on the committee's web site since mid August. This week discussion in the IMCO Committee on the report continues with the objective to reach a final version.

The report is very comprehensive and covers a full range of aspects around the current European standardisation system. It especially focusses on CEN, CENELEC, the National Bodies and their processes and structures. ETSI with its highly successful mixed model of direct membership and national representation comes a bit too short in the draft report and in the discussions.

The draft report very much focusses on preserving the current system. It is not visionary or forward looking. I appreciate that the current strengths of the European standardisation system need to be preserved – and I would add: in some cases even strengthened, e.g regarding improved transparency and the possibility for all interested stakeholders to follow standardisation activities and provide comments. Yet, I believe that there are challenges ahead of us that require a bit of new thinking and punctual reform. Globalisation and the increasing importance of global standards is one such challenge; the high potential for innovation by integration of technologies and the role of standards as facilitators ensuring interoperability is another; and the role of standards in policy making in general is an important third example.

Similarly, the urgent needs of the ICT sector for standardisation reform are not dealt with. While the report acknowledges the Commission's ICT White Paper the recommendations given, in this case in particular recommendation 28, are solely focussing on the current status quo. To be very clear: the transfer of specifications from fora/consortia to international standards organisations or ESOs is already possible today. But is very obvious that there are many instances where this does not work and is, therefore, not sufficient for effective policy making and public procurement as far as a global technology like ICT is concerned. Given the fact that the ICT sector has been identified as the sector where change in standardisation policy is most urgently needed, this is a strong deficiency of the draft report. This is probably the most important point that could be fixed by the Committee this week.

Some important aspects around this fora/consortia discussion:

a large part of the most relevant and broadly implemented standards in ICT are developed by so called fora/consortia outside of the formal standardisation system;
when talking about such fora/consortia in the ICT sector we talk about well-established global organisations operating with highly open and transparent processes and with a broad global membership including large and small companies, public authorities and academia (to be very clear: closed private clubs are out of the scope);
since the standards from these fora/consortia are widely used and implemented globally (and relevant) there is no need and no added-value for transferring them into formally recognised organisations; after all, transferring includes additional overhead and administrative work and there are some issues like different IPR regimes that have sometimes been impossible to solve;
so bottom line: many well-established and relevant ICT standards will not become formal standards but will be need for effective EU policy making, for innovation and for public procurement;
all of this has been taken into account in the proposals made by the Commission in the ICT White Paper.

My wish-list, at first stage, for the IMCO committee and its report is pretty simple:

Welcome the ICT White Paper, express support for it and urge the Commission and the Member States to work on its implementation;
State the need for processes that enable direct referencing of ICT fora/consortia standards in EU policies and public procurement provided that these standards meet a set of well defined openness criteria like the attributes of eligibility laid down in the ICT paper;
Support the implementation of a multi-stakeholder platform on ICT standardisation as advisory group to the Commission.

Finally, it is worth noting that these fairly moderate changes to the European standardisation system as expressed in the ICT White Paper are globally seen as a very innovative and forward-looking step taken by Europe. Europe should work hard to keep this leadership role and strive for the fast legal implementation of a new, modernised ICT standardisation policy now.

Back from vacation ....

2010-09-02T22:16:00.003+02:00

Coming back from vacation has been pretty tough this time because of the cold weather here North of the Alps. We had perfect and warm summer weather in the South-West of France at the Atlantic coast. But driving back home suddenly North of Orleans and Troyes the temperature fell down to less than 13 degrees. Urrgghh... We must have looked like coming from another planet in our shorts, short sleeves and flip flops.

But France was extremely nice. We really enjoyed it very much - the beaches, the food, the way of life. As an appetizer I post some pictures below.

No September has started which is usually a busy month as everyone is back from vacation getting ready for autumn and year-end work. There is a good deal of work ahead - I will keep you posted.

Great Atlantic beaches

Growing oysters

Dune du Pyla

Beautiful lake-side beach

Bordeaux

Sunset on the beach

To be or not to be - good to have been there

2010-08-02T16:52:00.000+02:00

Saturday evening we saw Hamlet at the Heidelberg Castle Festival – luckily with perfect weather this evening. The Castle Festival is always a fantastic event with open air performances in the central castle courtyard. It was a very modern production of good old Shakespeare, with a good many modifications of the old text, but extremely impressive.

Director Simon Solberg has created a tour de force into all evil of the world. His Hamlet gets mad about the corruption and deceit he sees everywhere. The serpent of evil has undermined the entire world and continues to drive mankind into a life that is not worth living and that is disgraceful for human beings. Hamlet impressively shows this in the famous play within the play which he orchestrates. He starts with Adam and Eve and ends with the big banking crash of recent years. However, his madness drives Hamlet to finally becoming a tragic hero in the form of a terrorist accepting the death even of his friends. Like in the original of roughly 400 years ago the ending is disastrous. Death is everywhere – while there might be a glimpse of hope because the citizens of Denmark entered the castle ready to overthrow the corrupt regime.

The production is extremely powerful and the actors, above all Paul Grill as Hamlet, were marvellous and had to work really hard. I have never seen such a fast-moving production before, full with action and full with citations from other plays, from the rock and pop scene, from the global discourse of the last 40 years as such – including trivial TV shows as well as “the serious arts”. My favourite was the serpent talking like Kermit from the Muppets and Sesame Street. And don't worry if you don't remember any serpent at all from the last time you read Hamlet ;-)

There were some people who expressed their dislike with this production when the break started. Some even left and did not want to stay for the second part. The review articles that appeared in the local press are pretty neutral. The local Rhein-Neckar TV even gives you some glimpse of the performance. A nice picture gallery is available on the Heidelberg theatre's website.

All of us really enjoyed the performance very much. We found it very thought-provoking and all in all an impressive new interpretation of Hamlet in our time. This is definitely innovative theatre. This Hamlet might have some impact and influence far beyond the old walls of Heidelberg castle.

Openness at the core of eGovernance

2010-07-26T10:47:00.001+02:00

A couple of weeks ago a Yale scholar, Dr Laura DeNardis, visited Europe and presented on e-Governance policies for interoperability and open standards. Dr DeNardis was, for instance, keynote speaker at a breakfast briefing hosted by OpenForum Europe. Unfortunately, I could not attend this event due to some schedule conflict, but only got the report – which made me regret even more that I couldn't attend.

But here's good news: Laura DeNardis' paper on the topic is available for download – I just came across this download link on the Social Sciences Research Network today.

I find this paper a very valuable piece of research. In a comparative approach Dr DeNardis has examined eGovernment policies around globe. She puts some spotlight on the government interoperability frameworks established in South Africa, Europe (the European Interoperability Framework – EIF), Brazil and Japan and, in the final section, derives some clear recommendations out of her research.

Dr DeNardis' analysis shows the changed role of governments with respect to ICT standards:

“Governments increasingly do not simply assume that 'all will be well' with standards. ICT standards have become an invisible but powerful form of technological rulemaking with consequences for national innovation policy, public safety, knowledge policy, and government efficiency and openness. Even in the 21st century, interoperability through standards is not a given but something that must be promoted. Lack of interoperability or problems with standards can create social or economic harm or contribute to a loss of faith in government. The use of proprietary specifications can impede government functions and services or make e-Government services and critical public information dependent upon a single company. These same proprietary specifications can limit the pace of information and communication technology innovation and be used as technical barriers to trade in global technology markets.” (p. 22)

In other words, Governments should consistently require open standards. As Dr DeNardis states, “When a standard is openly published and available to implement in new products, it can result in multiple, competing products and rapid technological innovation.” (pp. 2-3). The paper shows how leading global ICT standards organisations have adopted open standards policies governing the development, the access to and the availability of the respective organisation's standards. And the paper works out the relation between an eGovernment policy and the various functions governments have to fullfil, be it global trade, facilitating innovation, promoting competitiveness, ensuring fair and equal access to government information and to interaction with public authorities, etc.

Concluding, Dr DeNardis first provides, as she calls it, a “working definition of open standards” built around the key aspects of (i) open in development; (ii) open in implementation; (iii) open in use. And building on this working definition the paper derives a set of eight guiding principles for government interoperability frameworks.

Dr DeNardis' paper is definitely worth reading for everyone who is interested in standards and their use and implementation. It provides deep insights in the interests governments have and need to have in standardisation and open standards as critical elements in support of key government activities and tasks. And it gives a clear perspective on items to consider when defining eGovernance policies. I believe the paper can be of high relevance both for governments as they work on their policies or on refining them; for technology providers as they define their strategies and their portolios; for standardisers as they look at the future standards needed and at the terms and conditions for these standards; and, last but not least, for everyone of us – the citizens – as we have an interest in how public services are designed so that an open and democratic system is provided from which everyone can benefit in the interaction with their governments and authorities.

Relevant link of today: Video message from Vice-President Kroes to GUADEC 2010

2010-07-14T09:47:00.000+02:00

Vice-President Neelie Kroes, EU Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, has given a video message on open source to the upcoming Gnome conference GUADEC 2010. The message is available on Youtube and embedded on the GUADEC website as well. I also embed it below.

In her speech Commissioner Kroes outlines the high acceptance of open source, its potential for innovation and its relevance for governments and public administrations. She mentions the leadership Europe has pursued on openness with the European Interoperability Framework, with other programmes like OSOR.EU, and now with the Digital Agenda and its focus on open standards and interoperability. Only 4 minutes long this is a remarkable address from the Commissioner bringing Europe back into the pacesetting position on driving growth, competitiveness and transformation in the digital age.

But just watch yourselves:

Football world cup 2010 – some personal observations and conclusions

2010-07-13T15:32:00.002+02:00

Spain made it – congratulations!!! Haven't got any mail from my Spanish friends and colleagues since the weekend. Wondering when they will have recovered ;-)

I very much like the reaction of Iniesta who scored Spain's golden goal in the final: when being back home and asked to give a speech he said had he known that he would be asked to speak he wouldn't have scored the goal.

I also very much like the Spanish coach. It was reported that his motto in life was that “modesty and intelligence bring success” (see the online article in the FAZ).

In general, modesty and team spirit seem to have won in this world cup. The big stars were not able to dominate the matches. I like that because I am a strong believer in team work and collaboration.

Very many comments were made about the English referee of the final. Some think he should have been more tough and shown red to some Dutch – and by the way the Dutch were really going too far in the aggressive way they were playing and the guy who kicked the breast of his Spanish colleague should have been sent far away. Yet, others say that the referee did well in not “spoiling” this final by showing red cards like mad – as he could have done. Let's say it is a bit like poetic justice that Spain's golden goal was scored after a real mistake by the referee who had decided against corner for the Netherlands. And I think he was not bad at all, he managed to keep control of the match without showing red cards like mad.

Some commentator said that Spain was winning by playing the kind of football that Johan Cruyff introduced in Barcelona more than a decade ago. So ironically you could say that the former Dutch football super-star indirectly prepared the way for Spain to beat the Dutch in this world cup.

This was also the world cup of the highly qualified, meticulously working, highly experienced, and highly inspiring coaches.

France, Italy and England are facing tough times of renewal of their national teams.

I bet that the South American teams will make a lot of efforts to be much better and stronger in four years when the world cup will be held in Brasil – first time back in the Americas since 1986 when it was held in Mexico. First time back in South America since 1978 when the world cup was held in Argentina.

I like the songs from this worldcup, “Wavin' Flag” from K'naan and also Shakira's “Waka Waka” – yes, I do, I always liked Shakira. And good news for Sportfreunde Stiller: they can continue their song in four years by singing “'54, '74, '90, 2014” (they will probably have to pronounce 2014 as “zwanzig vierzehn” to match the rhythm) …

I hope that hosting this world cup in Africa will have some lasting effect. It brought the continent back to people's minds which is highly necessary. I thought the atmosphere was fantastic. I was a bit sad that Ghana did not make it into the semi-finals – would have been nice for Africa to have a team amongst the best 4 of the world.

Spain and Germany were playing the best football. This is what you could call modern football – extremely fast, always awake, extremely good ball handling. It is a pity that these two had to meet at the semi-finals already and could not combat in the final.

I will miss Günther Netzer as co-commentator on TV.

The German team was fantastic. Amazing the team spirit and the friendliness and naturalness of the players. Wonderful ambassadors of modern Germany.

In my opinion Germany was playing the best football since the seventies.

Aphorism of the day

2010-07-01T16:47:00.002+02:00

I am certainly too old for being a Digital Native. At best I can try to become a Digital Immigrant. But it will probably be up to my children and the like to decide whether I will be accounted with having residence in Digitaliana.

ICT Standardisation on top of Europe's reform agenda – a hearing at the IMCO Committee of the European Parliament

2010-06-24T08:41:00.008+02:00

Yesterday I was a speaker at a hearing on standardisation in the European Parliament. The hearing was organised by the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO). The chair of the IMCO Committee is Malcolm Harbour; the rapporteur on the standardisation topic is Edvard Kozusnik. It was perfectly organised and it was a great honour and pleasure for me to participate.

The agenda was pretty packed – mainly with people from the formal standards organisations (ISO, CEN/CENELEC, ETSI, National Bodies) and the societal stakeholders. So 7 to 8 minutes was all that each speaker got.

The hearing started with a speech from Commission Vice-President Tajani from DG Entreprise who outlined the status and plans for reform of European standardisation. He was also tightened by the agenda. In the 10 minutes he got he put standardisation in perspective of the Commission's policy objectives, in particular concerning innovation. He also gave some words of comfort to those who were afraid of a complete overhaul of the system, e.g. by implementing an agency. And he provided an outline on the Commission's plans and announced the legal reform package on standardisation for autumn this year.

Regarding ICT standardisation VP Tajani confirmed that the Commission sees the need for reform and stressed that all the elements that have been developed by the Commission so far will be implemented via the legal package. This was very promising to hear given the urgent need in ICT for reform action.

I was invited to talk about the need for ICT standards reform. My slides are available on slideshare:

1006 ep hearing j friedrich

View more presentations from Jochen Friedrich.

The hearing covered the full spectrum of standardisation and therefore touched on a multitude of aspects. The following are some personal take-aways I gathered:

Processes are important. With modern ICT technologies applied effectively in standards bodies it will be easier for interested parties, in particular including SMEs, to participate, travelling and cost will be reduced, and openness will be increased.
Transparency is key. Again, modern ICT technologies can provide the relevant tools for making work and procedures more transparent so that all interested parties can easily what's going on, what the status of development of a respective standard is, etc. Again, very important for SMEs.
Lack of clarity about reform needs. There is confusion regarding the clear identification of areas that need reform on the one hand and the extensive lobbying against reform on the other. While some say that the system is optimal and nothing should be changed, others claim that there are critical issues, e.g. with access to standardisation, as well as regarding the above mentioned topics of processes, openness and transparency. My personal conclusion on this is that better differentiation is needed in the discussion and especially with regards to topics that are of relevance for the changing of the legal framework and such that are procedural matters of the standards bodies.
No clear concept regarding services. The services sector is a huge growth market in Europe. This has raised the awareness of standards bodies for services. However, services is a broad field and there seems to be a lot of confusion when people talk about services standards - depending which sector and area people have in mind. Very often the underlying objective is certification. This might be helpful in some areas, but can kill growth in others. I believe more differentiation is needed here. And I believe the question that was raised by some MEPs whether services should have a separate legal framework is valid.
Lack of clarity regarding the benefits of standards in relation to public procurement. I had the impression that the relation between standards, interoperability, competitiveness and the role public procurement has in this needs to be further elaborated. Markus Reigl representing the German Business Federation (BDI) and I stressed the common industry position that referencing standards in public procurement is highly important for promoting interoperability and fostering competitiveness in Europe.
ICT is clearly identified as the sector that urgently requires reform. This probably the only really clear point. It was widely acknowledged that processes need to be available so that global open standards from so-called fora and consortia, i.e. organisations like OASIS, W3C, IETF, etc., can be used in EU policies and public procurement. And the proposed solution has clearly been outlined by the Commission in the ICT White Paper which received broad stakeholder support in the public consultation.

You are correct in assuming that the latter pleases me very much ;-) I was the last speaker on yesterday's agenda trying to highlight and explain again the need for reform. The discussion and reactions I got afterwards were, for sure, very encouraging - even though the Commission seems to favour one single legal act while we in industry think that a separation of Directive 98/34 and the ICT-specific Council-Decision 87/95 would be better and could be realized faster.

The full information about the hearing - including all presenatations - is available on the IMCO Committee website. If I were asked to sum up the entire hearing I got the impression that the MEPs have a very good sense on the needs regarding standardisation in and for Europe as well as on the potential and importance of standardisation for competitiveness and growth. It will be interesting to see the final report of the IMCO committee as well as the report of the ITRE committee that also deals with standardisation and for which Reinhard Buetikofer, rapporteur of the ITRE committee, gave a short and very substantial summary. All of this is certainly a space that is worth to keep watching.

OpenForum Europe Summit: Presentations online

2010-06-16T10:38:00.000+02:00

The OpenForum Europe Summit which took place in Brussels on Thursday last week was a highly successful and informative event with a fine set of excellent speakers and panelists.

In my last blog entry I reported in detail about Vice-President Kroes' speech which was a powerful interpretation of the Digital Agenda and the most important actions associated with it.

All presentations and speeches that were given at the Summit are now available online on the OpenForum Europe Summit 2010 website. Shortly the recordings will be added, too.

In addition, you might also want to take a look at the twitter entries that were posted during the summit and have been added since then.

Europe ready to continue taking leadership on Openness

2010-06-11T12:39:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, Vice-President Kroes of the European Commission, responsible for the Digital Agenda, gave the opening keynote speech at the OpenForum Europe summit in Brussels. The conference room at Autoworld Brussels was packed with people including some high level representatives on IT technology and standardisation from governments, industry and communities.

VP Kroes' speech was extremely powerful and inspiring. It is available on the Commission website and definitely worth reading. Building on the strong substance of the recently published Digital Agenda for Europe , VP Kroes set the directions for Europe to be a leader in the digital age. The EU will continue as a pacesetter taking leadership on openness and on defining open government IT policies.

VP Kroes started with reconfirming her position expressed two years ago, that “choosing open standards is a very smart business decision” stressing the importance of open standards for interoperability and making it very clear how highly she rates openness: “I am still a big fan of open standards. I believe in openness, and I believe in practising what one preaches.” And to prove her point on openness she asked the simple rhetorical question which standards are likely to get more uptake: those that you have to buy, acquire a license and pay royalties or those that you can simply download from the web and that are freely available for implementation. Just to be clear, that latter is what open standards are about.

From this starting point, the Commissioner elaborated on some of the key issues that are on the Commission's to-do list to be tackled for getting the Digital Agenda going. Let me take a glimpse at some of them.

First on VP Kroes' list was the reform of the European standardisation system. She reconfirmed the plan for reforming the European standardisation system introducing processes for making global open standards from fora/consortia like OASIS, W3C etc. available from Europe, e.g. by assessing these standards against a set of openness criteria.

Next on her list was IPR. Ms. Kroes stressed that she has nothing against including IP into standards but there is a need for more transparency and certainty. In particular she highlighted ex ante declaration as a possible way to explore further in standards organisations.

Turning to the use of standards in the public sector VP Kroes clearly expressed that public authorities need to be careful of not getting locked in using proprietary software. An example I liked most she used was that is inacceptable that kids in school are forced to use some specific vendor software. Rightfully, she considers getting into ock-in a waste of public money and made clear that openness and the focus on standards are the best way to prevent that.

With a similar focus on how tax-payers' money is spent, VP Kroes went on stressing the importance of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) for fostering cross-border interoperability in Europen eGovernment. She outlined that the current EIF is “not bad”, that it “sets out a list of characteristics of 'open standards'”, but that improvemens are still possible.

To me, if I could bring-in a wish list, I would hope that this means that the EIF 1.0 will remain the foundation of thinking and will be supplemented rather than fundamentally reworked. EIF 1.0 has been at the core of European leadership on openness and interoperability. What in my mind is needed is not a new EIF but simply supplementing it by providing more details in some areas like infrastructure, architecture, etc.

Before reaching the end of her speech Ms. Kroes briefly touched on the importance of interoperabilty and on efforts for making companies disclose relevant interoperability information.

Ms. Kroes concluded that interoperability and standardisation play a high role in the Digital Agenda – also on a horizontal level for fostering innovation in areas of technology integration. She mentioned eHealth and smart metering as examples. She finished by pointing out that “there will be plenty who try to stop change”, but that she will not rest and will work towards this change.

I am sure that this speech from VP Kroes will get a wide reception and will be considered a cornerstone for the Commission's work ahead. It was an enlightening interpretation of the Digital Agenda highlighting the key topics for action and almost providing a roadmap of Commission activities for the rest of this year.

The OpenForum Europe summit was a wonderful set up and VP Kroes' opening keynote was a great starting point for a great, highly informative and high level conference. All presentations will soon be available online on the OpenForum Europe summit website.

OpenForum Europe Summit on Openness at the heart of the EU Digital Agenda

2010-06-09T12:15:00.000+02:00

The OpenForum Europe will hold its annual summit in Brussels tomorrow, Thursday, June 11, starting at 9 am in Brussels, Autoworld, 11 Parc du Cinquantenaire. The summit is open for everyone - see the invitation and agenda on the OpenForum Europe website.

The agenda has largely been inspired by the European Commission's Digital Agenda. Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes will give the opening keynote - which alone is worth attending the summit. Almost exactly two years ago VP Kroes, the Commissioner for Competition, spoke at the OpenForum Europe taking a strong stance on openness and open standards. The Digital Agenda presented by VP Kroes some weeks ago can be seen as a direct continuation of her positions and reasonings two years ago.

The summit will continue with two sessions on the open digital European market and on open eGovernment. The OpenForum Europe managed to get numerous high level speakers for this summit so that high quality and lots of interesting thoughts and inspiring and innovative thinking are guaranteed. I am all enthusiastic about it. Let's go and participate.

On reading the responses to EU Commission's public consultation on standardisation

2010-06-08T14:50:00.000+02:00

The EU Commission's public consultation on the European standardisation system ended about 2.5 weeks ago. All responses which the Commission received have meanwhile been published and are available online on the Commission web site.

Curious as I am, I scanned through several of the responses last night – not all, though, since the Commission received many – really many. So I just picked some of which I thought could be interesting. Below I record a handful of observations which I would like to share with the world (hello world!):

Reservations about changes prevail: The responses I looked at are far from enthusiastic about change. Almost everybody stresses that the current European standardisation system works well and its successful structures should not be jeopardized. Even more, some respondents seem to be almost frightened about possible changes and therefore give strongest “No”-statements on almost all questions. Personally, I think this might partially be due to the fact that the direction the Commission is planning to go for the revision of Directive 98/34 is not clear yet. Together with the confusion around the options listed in the context of the Impact Assessment study this might have led to a general notion that arguing against any change is the lowest risk.
Successful lobbying: There are obvious verbatim repetitions in the responses which shows that some successful lobbying with prepared responses was done ;-)
Strong support for ICT specific solution: A suprisingly high number of respondents stress the need for the reform of the EU ICT standardisation policy as proposed in the EU Commission's ICT White Paper. This goes across all kinds of organisations and is not limited to ICT-near groups. So to conclude: there is (i) a widespread awareness of the different global structures in ICT standardisation compared to other setors; (ii) a broad consensus on the need for the changes as proposed in the ICT White Paper; and (iii) a broad consideration that the proposals of the Commission are well-defined.
Confusion about the introduction of the WTO Principles: Several respondents reject the introduction of the WTO Principles into the European standardisation system. Several others point out that the current Directive 98/34 already lists principles in whereas clause 24 on which the European standardisation system is founded. The Commission questionnaire had not mentioned that this list is already today part of the Directive. Some stress that the WTO Principles are already implemented by the ESOs and that, therefore, it is not necessary to introduce them. And others bring this proposal in context with the establishment of further ESOs – which they then reject. Whatsoever, there seems to be a lot of suspicion around this proposal. I believe the WTO Principles are the internationally recognised high-level principles for standards development and there is no reason why the current list in the Directive should not be replaced with a reference to the WTO Principles.

If I were asked to draw some conclusion from my readings, I should come up with what has a good chance of becoming my ceterum censeo and propose to focus on the ICT standardisation reform. It is well-defined in the ICT White Paper, it's pressing need is obvious and widely recognised, and the proposals brought forward by the Commission receive broad stakeholder support.

The implementation should be done in a successor-document to Council Decision 87/95 with a focus on the use and implementation of standards and on interoperability. This should be de-coupled from the horizontal standards review of Directive 98/34. And it could and should be done fast.

A first reading of the Digital Agenda for Europe

2010-05-25T11:56:00.002+02:00

Last week the Commission published its final version of the Digital Agenda. This was developed under the leadership of Commissioner Kroes who took over the responsibility for the Digital Agenda with the new European Commission earlier this year.

The Digital Agenda is one of the so-called seven flagship initiatives of this Commission and its Europe 2020 strategy. The Digital Agenda's basic objective is given in the very first sentence of the document:

“The overall aim of the Digital Agenda is to deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single market based on fast and ultra fast internet and interoperable applications.”

Thus the Digital Agenda identifies the two key pillars of the digital age: (i) integration, networked societies and economies with the internet as the prime medium for communication and integration; and (ii) – close linked with the first – interoperability, interoperable applications that allow the exchange of data and the use of information and data.

The Digital Agenda covers the full spectrum of aspects, technologies, requirements and actions along these lines. It makes many excellent points and in general deserves a lot of praise and support. It integrates across Commission DGs and provides a consolidated and consistent strategy for the next decade. In the following I want to focus on the aspects around standardisation and interoperability. These play a key role, for sure, since the “Digital Agenda can only take off if its different parts and applications are interoperable and based on standards and open platforms” (p. 5).

Regarding standardisation, it is critical for the Digital Agenda that the changes and recommendations get implemented which the Commission outlined in its 2009 White Paper on “Modernising ICT Standardisation in the EU - The Way Forward” (COM(2009) 324 final). These changes will, above all, provide Europe with the necessary means for using and implementing standards that were developed globally and got wide market acceptance. And the white paper recommendations take precaution that only such standards will be eligible for use which were developed in open and transparent processes.

The Digital Agenda has taken this up as Key Action 5 announcing that the Commission will “propose legal measures on ICT interoperability by 2010 to reform the rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT for and consortia standards” (p. 15). And it is outlined that the Commission will further promote the use of standards in public procurement because this will ensure interoperability, increase competition and reduce the risk of lock-in.

Regarding interoperability, the Commission stresses that in addition to the activies in the ISA programme (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations), most notably the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), the Commission will “Examine the feasibility of measures that could lead significant market players to license interoperability information” (p. 16).

The Digital Agenda also touches on the issue of IPRs in standardisation. The Commission will further look at way to improve the situation for IPR transparency and certainty in the context of standardisation. Ex ante rules to be applied in standards organisations is one concrete example that is given.

To my mind the Digital Agenda is a milestone in the early work of the new Commission. It has potential to really drive governments, societies and economies in Europe as we are at the start of a decade that promises to lead us to very new and partly unimaginable realms of the ways we live and work. I highly welcome the clarity and the focus on change in the Digital Agenda. The ICT standards reform, for instance, has been on the Commission's table for too long already, all proposals and comments have been made – the Digital Agenda now puts it again into the proper – and highly relevant – context of the overall digital strategy for Europe.

I trust that the legal implementation will be driven fast now. It is of utmost importance for the success of using ICT in policy making, above all in innovation policy, take, for instance, the areas of eEnergy and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) dealt with in the Digital Agenda. If Europe wants to drive innovation in such leading-edge areas it needs to include ICT standards from global fora and consortia.

Some criticism was made regarding the lack of the term “open standard” in the Digital Agenda. This is, for sure, true. A concept like open standards that is so braodly used and applied including by EU member states can't be ignored by the Commission. While I understand that the term is not a “formal” term used by the Commission for European standardisation, there is no reason not to use it at all. Open standards are important – especially in the context of the internet, of software interoperability and of eGovernment.

Yet, the lack of using the term “open standard” seems to be really *just* an issue of terminology, not of concept or content. The Digital Agenda is very clear that it talks about “open platforms” (e.g. p. 5; p. 25) and about standards “which can be implemented by all interested suppliers” (p. 15). And – as mentioned above – the Digital Agenda is very clear on reducing lock-in and means to enforce interoperability. So there might be a little spot that the term “open standard” is not even mentioned, but it does not seem to be something to be worried about.

I am positive that this Digital Agenda will have a strong push effect for Europe; for openness, interoperability and the use and implementation of standards. It is in line with the overall Commission Europe 2020 strategy. It makes many things around ICT concrete and combines the different Commission's DG's efforts into a consistent strategy. And it provides a number of prerequisites and key actions for fostering innovation in Europe. The ball is still with the Commission, though, to go for a fast implementation of the actions.

Still open: EU public consultation on reform of European Standardisation System

2010-05-11T23:37:00.005+02:00

The European Commission is moving on with it's agenda regarding the revision of the European Standardisation System. Following the EXPRESS panel and its report and the work on the obligatory Impact Assessment which the Commission has had done over the last two months, a public consultation was launched some weeks ago inviting everybody to give input on the revision of the European Standardisation System. The consultation is still running until May 21.

Just to remind everyone: like EXPRESS this consultation is not specific to IT and communication technologies (ICT), it covers the full spectrum of standardisation. On the other hand, the Commission is explicit that this consultation is not meant to repeat last year's consultation on the ICT White Paper and thus the specific ICT issues that had already been addressed are excluded from this new exercise. This does, however, not mean that the consultation is irrellevant for ICT. Far from it, it asks several questions about standardisation and the European Standardisation System that are of high importance for anyone interested in standardisation – including ICT.

In the context of this consultation some public debate has built up on the reform of the European Standardisation System – including a lot of speculation and a good deal of FUD. Partly this may result from the options which the Commission had drafted as the basis for the Impact Assessment study. Some of these options would, indeed, mean a fundamental restructuring of the European Standardisation System, if not an abolishing of the current system. And partly it may result from the fact that the Commission has not yet presented a precise outline on which changes are actually being considered; the questions of the current consultation only give some vague hints and leave a lot room for interpretation. The best overview can be gained from the Roadmap the Commission has drafted up.

I always like a vivid debate. Makes things more exciting than just silence and stiff exchange of positions. But for sure the facts need to correct, the style needs to be professional and the overall attitude needs to be democratic, i.e. respect others and their opinions, as well, listen and be open for new arguments. Openness might, in fact, be a key aspect in the overall debate: openness for new things, for innovative add-ons to the current system. In my personal resumee on the EXPRESS report I blogged about what I believe was not considered in the required detail yet and what is important for standardisation in Europe. Overall the system in Europe works well. But it is the pivotal improvements that are required for future success. And for the ICT sector the Commission's ICT White Paper provides highly innovative proposals for urgently needed improvements.

In my opinion the following aspects are most critical regardnig the revision process of the European Standardisation System:

Fast revision of ICT standardisation policy: The Commission needs to go for the revision of ICT Standardisation Policy as laid down in the ICT White Paper last year soon as possible. The ICT White Paper presented a consistent programme for change and received broad support in the public consultation. The changes are highly critical for effective innovation policy making and in general for innovation, competitiveness and growth in Europe.
Separate revision of horizontal standardisation system and ICT policy: The revision of the ICT standardisation policy should be decoupled from the horizontal review of the European Standardisation System. They are different in scope: While the horizontal review is concerned about the development of standards in support of regulation and legislation, the focus of the modernising of the ICT standards policy is about the use and implementation of standards for promoting interoperability and competitiveness.
No need to fundamentally reconstruct the current system, but a need to innovate: The current European Standardisation as governed by Directive 98/34 works fine. What is important, though, is that there are some specific, innovative, pivotal improvements that make the system fit for the next decade, in particular for coping with all challenges of globalisation. The future European Standardisation System needs to be flexible enough for reacting to global (and other) trends effectively and without coming into a deadlock.

Everybody still has the chance to submit innovative ideas in the context of this consultation. It will be very interesting to see all the submissions once they are published on the Commission website. In my opinion the Commission is well set-up for taking the necessary steps for innovative reform of the European Standardisation System. ICT could move ahead fast with a focus on the implementation of standards. This would manifest Europe's global leadership in standards policy.

Spring impressions from Heidelberg

2010-05-04T16:42:00.000+02:00

Spring has made a pause again with rather cold and cloudy weather outside. But the last weeks saw some fabulous days with open-space life returning. The following pictures are some impression of the riverside lawn at the Neckar in Heidelberg on some of the first nice, warm and sunny weekend days this year. Spring ... please come back....

Relevant link of today: Kroes champions interoperability in draft 'digital agenda'

2010-04-14T11:14:00.000+02:00

In an article in Euractiv the draft digital agenda strategy document is discussed which is under preparation by Commissioner Kroes. Publication of the digital agenda has been announced for late April / early May.

The Euroactiv article also refers to the draft version of the digital agenda which leaked a couple of weeks ago and which contains some important and forward looking concepts (see also my blog post of late March):

"However, a draft version of the plan – revealed by specialist website PC INpact – places great emphasis on interoperability and the notion of open standards.
'The headline target for this action area is to reform the EU standardisation regime by 2015 to reflect the rise and growing importance of ICT standards developed by various fora and consortia, in particular as regards the Internet,' the Commission draft says.

"But while there is consensus that greater interoperability of ICT systems stimulates economic growth and makes digital solutions cheaper for small business, 'guidelines on open standards and interoperability have proved hard to define,' the Commission adds. [...]

"Kroes wants to 'reform the governance system for ICT standards in Europe to recognise ICT fora and consortia standards'. She also recommends 'transparent disclosure rules for intellectual property rights (IPR) and licensing conditions in standard-setting' [...]"

Read the full article online on Euroactiv.

Relevant link of today: Microsoft Fails the Standards Test

2010-04-06T16:00:00.000+02:00

In his blog entry from last week Alex Brown reviews the status of ooxml two years after it was accpted as an ISO standard.

"The second anniversary of the approval of ISO/IEC 29500 (aka OOXML) is upon us. The initial version of OOXML (Ecma 376 1st Edition) was rejected by ISO and IEC members in September 2007, and it was only after extensive revisions and a bitter standards war in the following months that a revised format was finally approved on April 2, 2008.

[...] Microsoft seems set for failure. In its pre-release form Office™ 2010 supports not the approved Strict variant of OOXML, but the very format the global community rejected in September 2007".

Relevant link of today: Robert Madelin new Director-General for Digital Agenda

2010-04-01T13:06:00.000+02:00

The news just came in, e.g. via EurActiv.com, that

"The most senior official in the European Commission's health directorate will take charge of the new 'Digital Agenda' portfolio as part of a shakeup of top-ranking Brussels bureaucrats.

"The British-born official, who ranks among the most high-profile civil servants in Brussels, will answer to Neelie Kroes, the commissioner for the Digital Agenda."

Read, for instance, in EurActiv.com or in europeanvoice.com.

Relevant link of today: Open Source and Open Standards under Threat in Europe

2010-03-31T10:25:00.000+02:00

Earlier this week Glyn Moody posted an article shedding some light on what is apparently currently going on behind closed doors about the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and about the Digital Agenda under preparation by Commissioner Kroes and DG Information Society. Extensive lobbying seems to be done in order to change the basic direction of openness which the Commission has taken for years and which has given leadership to Europe and to the Commission in an age of transition to new, open ways of working and innovating.

I am still optimistic that the Commission will be resistant against any backwards-oriented lobbying and retain its clear and fresh view on information and communication technologies (ICT), standardisation, interoperability and openness:

Openness is the key paradigm of the time, it has produced new and highly productive ways of working and it is vital for fostering innovation;
Market players of all kind are in a process of change to a new equilibrium of proprietary and openness adapting to the new paradigm for being successful and maintaining leadership on the global marketplace;
The European Commission and public authorities in Europe play a key role in driving this transformation and leveraging openness in all areas for the benefit of the European marketplace and the citizens of Europe.

Glyn Moody gives some important alert. Read his full article at computerworlduk online.

Document Freedom Day - let's celebrate and ask for more

2010-03-30T17:34:00.000+02:00

Never was document freedom easier to get than today with the open document format (ODF) available for some years. It was originally developed as an open standard in OASIS where it is also continuously maintained in the respective technical committee. And it was submitted and approved as an ISO standard.

Tomorrow, March 31, is again "Document Freedom Day". It is clearly a day to celebrate. Document freedom is an idea, a concept that has got momentum. The open document format is essential for efficient automatic data processing since the data format is openly laid down; it supports competitiveness and choice since everyone can implement the standard and offer innovative competitive technologies on the level of the implementation; it thus prevents single vendor lock-in and prevents that people and citizens need to buy one specific software from a single vendor for reading, editing or crafting documents.

Document freedom is what is needed. Public authorities started to take this up. This is the right way to go forward and should be supported by all of us.

So join in and celebrate Document Freedom Day on March 13 and make this day a starting point for yet another successful year for open document formats and document freedom, promoting more take up of the ODF and progress on openness in this very relevant area.

Relevant link of today: Digital Commissioner Kroes proposes EU policy of open standards

2010-03-22T10:17:00.000+01:00

In his blog post the member of the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) organisation, David Hammerstein, allows some glimpses on a Commission draft document coming from DG Digital (Information Society) on the "Digital Agenda for Europe":

AN IMPORTANT POLICY PAPER, A Digital Agenda for Europe – A policy for smart growth and innovation in a digital society, HAS BEEN LEAKED OF WHICH AN EXCERPT IS BELOW. DIGITAL AGENDA COMMISSIONER KROES HAS PROPOSED A SERIOUS MOVE OF THE EU TOWARD OPEN STANDARDS AND INTEROPERABILITY. THESE PROPOSALS ARE ALREADY BEING ATTACKED BY HER COLLEAGUES IN THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION WHO REPRESENT ENTERPRISE, COMMERCE AND INTERNAL MARKET. NEVERTHELESS, THESE PROPOSALS DESERVE CONSUMER AND CITIZEN SUPPORT.

Read the full article with some more details on the document and direct quotes from it on David's page.

Eintracht beats Bayern

2010-03-22T09:34:00.001+01:00

When your team wins against Bayern it is always worth mentioning. To begin with, I am not one of those notorious "haters" of Bayern. They are a great and astonishing team and, let's be honest, the only German team that is really capable of coping with the great teams in Europe. But they just don't need to win all the time...

So last Saturday they came to Frankfurt - the only true team in Germany !! - after being unbeaten for 19 matches. And they led until close to the end when Frankfurt managed to beat Bayern with two wonderful goals 2:1.

For Frankfurt it should be a very motivating win after loosing three matches in a row. Let's see. But winning against Bayern is worth a blog post. See also the article in the FAZ online about Eintracht's match-winners.

Reactions on the EXPRESS report

2010-03-18T16:11:00.000+01:00

As you can imagine, having been a member of the EXPRESS panel I received quite some reactions since the publication of the the final EXPRESS report. This is, for sure, very interesting for me to see how the report is being received and what people think about it. I had posted my initial ramblings on the final report in my blog post right after the report was published.

The reactions I am getting range from valued support of the report to strong rejection. And it is pretty easy to locate the different feedback, too:

Those who like the report are organisations or people who predominantly work in the formal standardisation structures. They are happy that the report takes a rather conservative stance on the European Standardisation System (ESS) and does, in fact not propose a big overhaul but hardly any legal changes at all.

Those who reject the report largely come from the ICT world - and the more they are used to working in the standardisation structures which the IT world and in particular the software and internet world have created, the more do people think that the EXPRESS report is of almost no relevance for the ICT sector.

In between those extremes there are the people who, on the one hand, value the current ESS structures, but who, on the other hand, see a strong and urgen need for changes to accommodate the specifics of the ICT sector. They support a fast revision of Council Decision 87/95 with a focus on the implementation of (available, global open) standards and on fostering interoperability. And they see that Directive 98/34 in contrast has got a different focus, namely on the development of standards in support of regulation and of a harmonised European internal market. For this Directive they don't see a strong need for changes and would be happy if the legal processes were decoupled with a fast revision of the Council Decision based on the Commission proposals as laid down in the ICT White Paper.

Pesonally, I think that this middle way is pretty sensitive. There is an urgent need for ICT to get the legal changes as outlined in the ICT White Paper. Moreover, these changes provide Europe with an effective mechanism for dealing with one of the major future challenges: globalisation and how to make open standards that are well established and implemented on the global marketplace available for Europe and for use in EU policies and public procurement.

EXPRESS report published – a first personal review

2010-02-25T00:29:00.006+01:00

For the past 12+ months I was a member of the expert panel for the revision of the European standardisation system (EXPRESS) set up by the Commission with the task of developing recommendations for the standardisation in Europe for this new decade and beyond. EXPRESS was a group of 30 people appointed “ad personam”. It was agreat pleasure and very fruitful and inspiring to work in this group which had a broad spectrum of backgrouds from all different kinds of organisations including above all the formal international, European and national standards organisations, national governments and societal stakeholder groups in the EU.

The final report is now available on the Commission website. A bit of mystery had built up around the EXPRESS work since the group operated behind closed doors and under Chatham House rules. Hence the report was awaited with some curiosity and suspense. And be sure I already got some first reactions...

To be frank: don't expect any deep hidden secrets, any breakthrough thinking or innovative leaps. After all, the report is also a compromise worked out amongst the group with all the specific interests reflected. And EXPRESS covered the entire standardisation landscape with all sectors, far beyond ICT, so had to take into consideration quite diverse situations.

Personally, I see the report and the work of EXPRESS as starting point for a discussion over the next weeks rather than the final conclusion to the many issues and challenges which EXPRESS well identified and documented in the report.

The discussion around the future challenges for standardisation in Europe is excellent, I believe. But for sure the report does not sufficiently come up with answers to the identified challenges of the new decade. The role of the European Standardisation System (ESS) in an increasingly globally integrated world and in an increasingly deregulated market needs to be further discussed. The move from standards being used in support of regulation to standards being used in support of policies. The move from mandated standards development to the need for implementing standards for smarter and interoperable solutions and open systems. The report touches on these issues. Yet, some more innovation is required for coming up with the necessary transformations.

On the basis of this report, I believe that the following seven key topics (and there might well be more) need to be addressed further with the horizon of 2020:

Position the ESS for optimally supporting the development and for easily making use of open standards that are globally applicable and that are of high relevance for innovation and for innovation policy in Europe and beyond.
Strive for improved processes in standards development and in consensus building, ensuring utmost transparency and allowing all interested stakeholders to adequately participate. This includes the use of modern ICT technologies and the adaption to new developments like eParticipation, open innovation and open community work.
Put greater emphasis on the different sector needs and on the sectors' preferred approaches towards standardisation, e.g. with respect to global, regional or national levels.
Put greater emphasis on the market needs and on the key stakeholders driving standardisation.
Introduce a greater level of differentiation regarding the desired or potential effects of standards and allow for the needed flexibility, e.g. allow for different rules regarding the terms an conditions when standards are relevant for software-to-software or process interoperability in contrast to, say, basic, core technology.
Introduce processes for direct referencing of open standards developed in open, global organisations (fora/consortia like OASIS, W3C, the IETF) in EU policies.
Focus more on the integration of technologies and the combination of standards for achieving innovation.

The EXPRESS report provides good initial thoughts on all of these issues. There are ideas available and the report will surely help to further accelerate the thought process. In its recommendations, though, the report is perhaps too much anchored to the achievements of the current ESS over the last 20 years. What will be important for the revision of the ESS, however, is to create a structure that is able to constantly adapt to new developments. In other words, a structure that has transformation implicit and allows for continuous innovation of the ESS itself.

I'm sure that the EXPRESS report will raise many more comments, concerns, contradictions, etc. No doubt, it will provide a lot of food for thought and will be a fruitful trigger for debate. And already that will be one major added value of this document - in the context of the debate around Commission's endeavour of a modernisation of the ESS.

Relevant link of today: FAZ special on Social Media

2010-02-24T15:13:00.000+01:00

This new decade will clearly see the breakthrough of new ways of interaction, collaboration and networking using web technologies and social media. What started in the last 2 two 3 years is gaining more and more momentum. Individuals, companies, governments - they all see the fascination and the opportunities of social media.

The German newspaper FAZ currently features a series of articles on social media in its online edition. Unfortunately all in German - but worth a read.

Interesting video podcast - Peter Kruse on the internet, communities and open innovation

2010-02-18T23:07:00.000+01:00

A colleague recently pointed me at Peter Kruse and his work and theses. He is a leading German consultant with a focus on change management. Peter Kruse published a lot on youtube - very thought provoking statements about networking, common intelligence, open innovation, and how the internet changes the way we live, think, operate and collaborate in economies and societies.

On the "What's Next?" Blog there is a good interview with Peter Kruse in English where he takes sort of a tour de force on his thinking and theses around the internet and community work. Interesting and good food for thought.

Europe 2020 - the new EU strategy takes shape

2010-02-15T12:02:00.000+01:00

With the new European Commission being finally confirmed by the European Parliament last week (see also my blog post of last week) full dedication can be given to the new EU strategy "Europe 2020" succeeding the previous programme i2010.

As President Barroso outlines on the Commission's EU 2020 website this strategy shall be instrumental for the transformation of Europe "into a new sustainable social market economy, a smarter, greener economy where our prosperity will result from innovation and from using resources better, and where knowledge will be the key input."

There is a very good presentation from Commission provided as "Background Information for the Informal European Council, 11 February 2010". It outlines all the key challenges for this new decade, be it the aging population, climate change, education, etc. And so it defines the spectrum of the programme for the Europe 2020 work. Worth a look at...

Cornerstones of an Innovation Society (Part III): Transparency and Collaboration

2010-02-11T14:54:00.002+01:00

The times where innovation took place by one great mind sitting quietly in some ivory tower and inventing great things are long gone. Team work is essential – we all know about that. But also team work is not sufficient anymore. The complexities of our world are so manifold and we are unlikely to always have the full knowledge required for developing new things ready at hand in house.

Crowd sourcing is important. Let others participate, invite the crowd to bring in ideas and assets. President Barroso stressed this in his speech at last autumn's innovation summit where he stated that “crowd-sourcing and co-creation are now the order of the day”. And he concluded that EU policies need to reflect that, take that up. This is what open innovation means.

For successfully operating in this new environment it is essential that we practice transparency, that we are willing to open up things to others. And it is important that all operate with a collaborative spirit.

I was recently involved with some co-editors in the development of some interesting concept paper. While I was happy to share every single development step with the full group allowing them to give their feedback anytime, some of my co-editors were strongly against such a practice being afraid that this would confuse the bigger group.

Transparency and collaboration are, to a large extend, a matter of mind-set. Those who drive a project need to be ready to receive input from the outside anytime without feeling distorted and without much sensibility. And those who bring in ideas need to be aware that they contribute to work-in-progress, that they are invited and welcome to contribute. They need to apply creativity rather than criticism. Where such a mind-set is not given, collaboration runs the risk to fail and slip into competition, cantankerousness and fight. And, of course, successful collaboration means to be willing to derive consensus and being able to accept compromises.

Now, if I look at standardisation, transparency and collaboration are, of course, essential for the process of standards development. There are some organisations, like W3C, OASIS or the IETF, that have established exemplary processes for transparency and collaboration – powered by modern communication technologies and including Web 2.0 functionality.

It is pretty obvious: the more the trend for societies and businesses is towards collaboration and crowd-sourcing, the more will such elements have to be acknowledged and integrated by standards organisations, companies, governments, etc. And those who are best in operating in such a new environment will be most successful, most innovative on the long run.

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History:

Relevant link of today: OOXML not suitable for Norwegian government

2010-02-10T09:57:00.001+01:00

A study published by the Norwegian "Direktoratet for forvaltning og IKT" (Agency for public adminstration and ICT) comes to the result that OOXML is not suitable for being used by the Norwegian government. The study is available online in Norwegian. Amongst the reasons that are given are that the standard with its more than 6000 pages is not appropriate; it is not suitable for collaboration; and there is only one software that can implement it and produce the respective file format. Norway recommends pdf for electronic document exchange of documents that don't need to be edited and ODF (open document format) for all other documents.

See, for instance, the reports on Heise online (German), CIO and on Computerworld.

Parliament confirms new European Commission

2010-02-09T14:54:00.000+01:00

The news just fly in. The European Parliament has finally confirmed and approved the new European Commission. This is after a round of individual hearings which took place over the last month.

With this parliamentary vote the new Commission led by President Barroso can enter into its term of office.

As reported by forexyard, in his initial speech to the Parliament President Barroso outlined the top priorities for this Commission:

"The broad priorities are clear: making a successful exit from the crisis; leading on climate action and energy efficiency; boosting new sources of growth and social cohesion to renew our social market economy."

With a dedicated Commissioner, Ms Neelie Kroes, to drive the Digital Agenda in continuation of the Innovation Society, IT technologies and open standards can play a lead role in this context. Only think about all the potential in standards-based, smarter solutions for increasing energy efficiency and of the growing role of information technologies in integrating societies and economies.

It might be a good coincidence that this new Commission will take office early in the new decade - which will hopefully take us out of the current crisis and open many new opportunities to shape the world and the ways we work and live.

Digital Agenda for Europe - the new EU Commissioner's priorities

2010-01-04T11:54:00.004+01:00

Just before Christmas a first round of hearings of the European Parliament with the proposed new EU Commissioners took place - in written form with responses to questionnaires provided by the parliament.

For the ICT sector, the program and ideas of the new Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, Ms Neelie Kroes, are, for sure, of utmost interest. Ms Kroes' responses in the parliament questions are available online.

In this document Commissioner Kroes outlines 4 major priorities:

I intend to develop the European Digital Agenda in close cooperation with the European Parliament and the Council as well as with my Commission colleagues. My initial priorities are: (i) building the high speed networks of the future; (ii) making the online single market a reality; (iii) ensuring that all citizens participate in the information society; and (iv) generating more, better targeted support for ICT research and innovation. Both citizens and industry have a role to play in driving innovation, whether big or small, incumbent or challenger, blue-chip or start-up. (p. 4)

At the end of the document, in the section with the forward looking title "Developing Policy for a Digital Citizenship, Commissioner Kroes indicates a programmatic approach to ICT standardisation for Europe:

I will pay special attention to Europe's contribution to producing high-quality open ICT standards. (p. 7)

Finally, she concludes with mentioning some areas for action inclduing the following:

Further key actions include: following up on the eGovernment, e-Inclusion and eHealth Action Plans and Ministerial declarations. I will also be considering proposals for a Regulation on the eCall vehicle safety system and for the development of our policy on ICT for Energy Efficiency. (p. 7)

I find this a very promising document. Commissioner Kroes includes all major areas for action around ICT, she includes the relevance of open standards - simply a great outlook for what is needed and of areas of action by the Commission.

Happy New Year - and a great new decade to all

2010-01-04T09:37:00.003+01:00

Happy New Year ! Yes, indeed, we are in 2010 now. Almost unbelievable, isn't it? A new decade. With a new horizon 2020 and beyond.

The German newspaper FAZ had a great article in its edition of last Saturday (lead article of the Feuilleton part). It was about predictions for the future - especially in the telecommunications and internet sector. While diagnosing that most of these predictions are most of the times either totally wrong or so predictable that they are hardly predictions, the article focusses on some predictions which colleagues from IBM Germany made in 1987 about what the world will be like in 2010. And these IBM predictions from 1987 are remakable in the sense that many of them have actually come true.

The predictions include one about the ubiquitous use of computers and computing intelligence in our daily life and working environments, about the new ways of communication (including electronic mail) in our office environments, about the increasing role of IT as assistive technologies (e.g. in the area of accessibility), and about the fact that Artificial Intelligence technologies will not see a breakthrough and lead to a symbiosis of the human brain and computing.

For everyone who is able to read German I can heartily recommend this article also available in the FAZ online edition.

I have so far not seen any serious predictions about this new decade and what the world will be like in 2020. It looks as if the last decade - and in particular the last years - have shaken up all elements of both the societal, the political and the economic world order that potential predictors prefer to remain quiet and see the future rather unpredictable.

In the area of IT and communication technologies, though, there are some clear trends regarding smarter ways of working, smarter ways of doing things, new ways of social interaction and networking, new strategies of democratic participation and mind setting in the public sphere. It will definitely be a challenging new decade with a lot of potential for creativity and new ideas. Many good reasons to be excited about it....

Cornerstones of an Innovation Society (Part II): Embracing Change

2009-12-16T14:21:00.002+01:00

Innovation always means change. Innovators are hungry for change, for improvement, for finding better, smarter ways of doing things. And change always means that things will be different. Where people don't like to see things getting different there is no room for innovation. I assume there is no dispute on that.

Innovators drive change. They don't wait till they are changed. About a decade ago the small book “Who moved my cheese” from Spencer Johnson provided an entertaining and inspiring allegory on the need to embrace change and to actively get involved into working on the future and driving change.

Now, for sure all of us constantly see situations where people, groups or organisations are hesitant to accept change because they fear of loosing something, be it status, influence, market dominance, etc. The consequence is resistance to change – which is, in turn, a barrier to innovation.

It is, therefore, important to create a mentality for innovation. It is up to everyone of us to become more open to change, to constantly look and strive for change rather than waiting for others to start change processes. After all, those who do not drive change, will be changed. In his speech at the European Innovation Summit President Barroso talked about the task of “nurturing the mindset” (p.2). And for sure we need to go ahead with good example and develop the proper mindset ourselves.

The following 5 imperatives are fundamental for a culture of change and we constantly need to investigate ourselves:

Are there changes or modernisations that I consider necessary or desirable?
Are there areas where I am resistant to change and therefore block or try to avoid?
What prevents me from going ahead?
Am I open for the necessary changes and the consequences?
Am I ready to invest time and effort in taking responsibility for driving change?

These imperatives are certainly not inclusive. We can work on them to make them more precise. Suggestions more than welcome. But what is clear, I think: A successful innovation society needs a culture of change, a mindset that accepts and embraces movement, improvement, change – in other words: a mindset that is always ready to innovate.

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History:

See also my blog entry on Cornerstones of an Innovation Society (Part I): Openness

New era starts in Europe today as Lisbon treaty comes into force

2009-12-01T10:16:00.003+01:00

After a long time of debate and negotiation as well as of ratification in the member states the Lisbon treaty comes into force today. This treaty defines the new constitution for Europe - with two main new introductions:

a permanent President of the European Council
a High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy

For these two posts Herman Van Rompuy and Baroness Catherine Ashton were recently chosen.

The German newspaper FAZ gives on its website a good chart today illustrating the functions and organisations according to the Lisbon treaty.

See also the official EU website on the Treaty of Lisbon and the summary of the new structure at The Treaty at a Glance.

New European Commission is taking shape

2009-11-27T15:47:00.002+01:00

President Barroso announced today his new Commission. See the details about who will be responsible for which department in the Commission press release. Just to mention two of the new Commissioners: Ms Neelie Kroes from the Netherlands who was formerly responsible for DG Competition will now be lead the Digital Agenda - which will incorporate much of what was formerly DG INFSO. And the Italian Commissioner Mr Antonio Tajani will be responsible for Industry and Entrepreneurship, much of what was formerly DG ENTR. Both will also act as Vice-Presidents of the Commission.

EU Commission conference on Standards Education - my personal take-aways

2009-11-19T12:15:00.002+01:00

Yesterday the European Commission held a conference on standards education titled “Educating a New Generation of ICT Standards Professionals”. There was a focus on information and communication technologies (ICT) in relation to standards education. Part of the objective was to get an overview on the initiatives for standards education that are already available; to identify whether there are specifics for ICT that need to be considered and if so, which; and finally to come to some thinking towards recommendations and concrete actions.

To begin with, the workshop was of highest quality. Congratulations to the Commission for making such an interesting and inspiring event possible. The workshop brought together high capacity experts in the subject matter and policy makers as well as people from all stakeholders in ICT standardisation.

Not being an expert on standards education myself, my major take-aways from the conference are:

Standards education is an important topic that needs to be considered more in the discussions around EU standards policy reform.
Standards education is in itself a diverse field targetting very different audiences. Be it the standards development organisations that are interested in providing courses relative to the work in their institutions; be it academia looking at how to integrate the topic of standardisation into education curricula; be it small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that are looking for focussed information and for channels and multipliers to reach out to the many SMEs locally; be it consumer representatives that are in need of training and support for being properly equipped to represent consumer interests in standards matters.
To achieve a better level of knowledge about standardisation is important given the relevance of standardisation for innovation and competitiveness. This aims at the technical aspects as well as at business and legal aspects.
Very many things are already available, projects going on in standards education. What seems to be required is to gather and consolidate what is around and strive for a next level of cooperation between the actors in standards education. The ISO representative made a passionate plea into this direction.
The real specifics of the ICT sector are not yet covered, though. It became clear in the discussions of the last panel and in the presentations from W3C and IETF that there is some common ground equal for all standardisation, but that ICT standardisation has different ways for doing its work, yet with high effectiveness and efficiency.

There were also some side-remarks that were very interesting. These included above all the various statements stressing the need for openness and open standards in the ICT sector. I should like to add: for promoting the implementation of software interoperability and thus for facilitating innovation.

Finally, I think supporting activities in standards education can be a task for all of us who are active as “professionals” in the standardisation. All large companies have programmes for supporting academia in knowledge transfer or for working with networks and clusters. This could be a way of offering support and bridging the gap between practical knowledge and the need for education.

I left the conference with the impression that much can be done on the short range without too many efforts. There needs to be some funding, e.g. from the European Commission as well as from national and even regional governments, which, in my view, would be justified given that education is a societal task. Such funding would help to get started fast in some way, e.g. creating pilot projects with some universities for including standardisation into their curricula etc. These initial activities would, for sure, not solve all the issues. But I am a strong believer in piecemeal process and incremental enhancement and expansion.

French Prime Minster formally adopted French Interoperability Guide

2009-11-12T17:02:00.003+01:00

As announced by the French government yesterday, the French Prime Minister formally approved the French Interoperability Guide, the Référentiel Général d'Iinteropérabilité (RGI). The RGI outlines the needs for achieving Interoperability for eGovernment service provision and public administrations' IT infrastructures. It gives a clear commitment to openness and provides yet another successful, forward-looking implementation of the principles outlined in the European Interoperability Framework (EIF).

Vivid public debate around the EIF and openness

2009-11-12T13:20:00.003+01:00

A vivid debate is currently ongoing about the European Interoperability Framework (EIF). After the publication of the public draft for EIF 2.0 in summer 2008 and the public consultation on it (which ended in September 2008), a new draft leaked to the public end of last week.

The public reaction to the new draft is entirely negative complaining about the move away from a clear commitment to openness and outlining the risks of such a change:

In his article of Nov 2 in ComputerworldUK, titled “EU Wants to Re-define 'Closed' as 'Nearly Open'”, Glyn Moody concludes:

“[...] if the real version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework is anything like the one discussed above, with its pathetically devalued definition of openness [...] it will represent a huge setback for the use of free software in Europe, and a major boost for closed-source software producers and the patents they all-too often claim there [...].”

“Wo früher klar für mehr Offenheit plädiert wurde, steht jetzt eine schwammige philosophische Abhandlung über das, was Offenheit sein soll - im Grunde ein schönes Gefühl. Es gebe ein Offenheits-Kontinuum, auch Closed-Source-Software könne als "Open" betrachtet werden.”

Heise online (H-open) on Nov 10 summarises the “Protests against proposed redefinition of open standards within the EU”:

“Open source associations have criticised the fact that the draft of a planned amendment to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) [...] includes patented and proprietary solutions in an 'openness continuum'. They are concerned that this could significantly restrict the usability of open source software in public administration. [...] Until now, the EIF has required that standards be developed by non-commercial organisations and published either free of charge or for a nominal fee. IP rights, in particular patent rights, which impact a standard must also be made " irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis." This is important for ensuring that standards can be implemented in both proprietary and open source software without being restricted by commercial property rights.”

For the OpenForum Europe, Graham Taylor, the organisation's CEO, pointed out that

"The EU is at risk to lose its global leadership position on openness and interoperability. The Commission's reputation will be seriously damaged if EIF 2.0 is released in the way it is currently worded. [..] The drastic changes from the consultation document of 2008 to this document cannot be seen as resulting from the comments submitted through the public consultation [...].”

Perhaps this open, public and citizen-driven debate with the clear reactions against any move away from openness can help - to use some IT jargon - that bugs in the proposed new “EIF code” can be singled out before EIF 2.0 goes live.

As mentioned in my last blog on the importance of openness for an Innovation Society, I believe that EIF 1.0 needs an “innovation step” rather than a revision. Essentially, to me this means:

Build on the wide success and broad adoption of EIF 1.0 including its clear commitment to openness;
Develop it further, e.g. by covering new levels relevant for the realisation of pan-European eGovernment Services (PEGS) interoperability and by updating recommendations on architecture and infrastructure reflecting new market developments.

Regarding the latter, in fact, the new “leaked” draft for the EIF 2.0 does reflect some of these innovative updates. For instance, it extends the scope of interoperability to new, important levels like legal and organisational interoperability and it reflects service orientation as the central underlying architectural paradigm for modern eGovernment IT infrastructures.

Regarding the first, I would agree with those who are asking for a strong stance on openness and a reconfirmation of the principles that are included in EIF 1.0. Requiring open standards, considering open source technologies on equal footing with proprietary offerings – all of that is essential for the public sector.

EIF 1.0 has, indeed, had a global lead role on this. The openness principles of EIF 1.0 have been widely welcomed by member states, the general public as well as by governments all over the globe. Using non-documented, proprietary specifications or trying to achieve interoperability without open standards on the basis of homogeneity of IT systems will lead to critical lock-in situations and negatively impact choice, competition and innovation. The updated EIF 2.0 should leave no doubts on this. Especially as openness is high on the Commission's agenda as a central element for the transformation of the EU into an Innovation Society as pointed out by President Barroso in his recent speech at the European Innovation Summit.

EU Commission workshop on Standards Education

2009-11-12T09:31:00.003+01:00

Next week the European Commission is holding a conference on "Educating a New Generation of ICT Standards Professionals". The agenda looks very good - a lot of high level people will be presenting and discussing. Registration is still open via the Commission website.

Cornerstones of an Innovation Society (Part I): Openness

2009-11-09T09:44:00.003+01:00

Earlier this summer I blogged about the concept of a Knowledge Society for Europe as successor of the Information Society. And I had anticipated that several directorates in the Commission are working on the concept for the successor to Innovation Society.

Now President Barroso recently announced the programme for the new term of office of the Commission (see my last blog post in October). Under the motto “Knowledge4Innovation” he set the direction of “Transforming the EU into an Innovation Society”. This is a great move, I think, exactly at the right time, and with the right focus.

Innovation is key. It is key for solving the problems and challenges societies and economies are facing. Innovation is about constant improvement of the instruments, processes and relations we have in place for making things better, smarter, more efficient, more effective.

An innovation society is, in my opinion, a society that constantly aims for improvement, that constantly looks for better ways of doing the things we do. In our days, innovation is for society what the progressive movement was at the beginning of the last century. And I am sure innovation will shape much of this century in a similar way the progressive movement shaped the last century – up into the 1970s at least.

President Barroso also started to outline the focal elements for an Innovation Society. One of them is openness:

"Moreover, the application of innovations like Web 2.0 to business and public life is changing the way in which innovation happens. It is becoming more open and
collaborative. Once the preserve of a select elite, it now involves a much wider
range of actors. It tends to happen at the inter-section between different disciplines. It is sometimes disruptive, resulting in the downfall of established companies. Often, it is employee or consumer-driven. [...] crowd-sourcing and co-creation are now the order of the day!"

I think President Barroso is absolutely right. Over the last decade openness has increasingly become a key element for driving change and fostering innovation. In the IT world, the Open Source model (only think of Linux !), the increasing demand for Open Standards, and in general models of Open Innovation are prime examples.

Openness is moreover a key factor in the political arena as well as for societies in total. Opening up your think tanks, your expert groups etc. for including outside opinion and for gathering outside ideas and integrating them into your thinking is the approach for moving ahead in an Innovation Society.

There are two pieces of literature which I would list as key masterminds about the value of openness for innovation and progress. For the IT world it is Eric S. Raymond's “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”; for society as a whole it is James Surowiecki's “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I owe tremendous insights to both these writings.

It seems to be appropriate at this point to also stress that openness is not about making everything available for free for everyone and about letting loose on everything. Far from it. The key task is to find a new equilibrium between open and closed, between open and proprietary. Find new, innovative processes and instruments for opening up one's systems. Create permeable membranes rather than iron curtains. And we are seeing and will continue to see that those companies, organisations and even economies and societies perform best and progress best which are working on this change towards increased openness and open innovation.

Given all that I think President Barroso is right in outlining the task for the Commission:

"We need a new policy that reflects these changes. This means that we will have to, well, innovate!"

Some directorates and units had been ahead in the Commission already for some time – especially in the IT and standards world. Initiatives from DG Information Society have been aiming at more openness as a facilitator for innovation. Commissioner Kroes at several occasions outlined the benefits of openness and open standards for competitiveness and innovation. And, last but not least, the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) 1.0 had been a driver of openness and innovation in the area of eGovernment with a clear stance on Open Standards and on the need to consider Open Source offerings on equal footing with proprietary solutions.

In its discussions on standardisation and standard policy reform the Commission is currently at a crossroads. The White Paper on “Modernising ICT Standardisation in the EU” published in July this year proposes a bit more openness and would be a first step ahead (see my blog entry in July). EXPRESS is due to submit its report in January with recommendations for the overall European standardisation system. Supporting the transformation of the EU into an Innovation Society will be a key task for the new EU standards policy.

EIF is currently under review. I would say that the focus should not be to revise or review EIF 1.0, but – once again – to innovate. With EIF 1.0 the Commission took global leadership on openness and driving change. There seems to be a weird discussion currently whether to turn away from openness and adapt more to yesterday's thinking. This certainly would not help and would make the EIF almost meaningless. EIF 2.0 needs to build on the great successes of EIF 1.0 that can be seen in many of the member states and to further push for openness as key facilitator of innovation in the area of eGovernment, as well. After all, this is so critical for providing interoperable eGovernment services as part of the transformation of the EU into an Innovation Society.

Openness is essential for innovation. Don't wait for great minds locked-in behind closed walls to come up with the only valid solutions. In a knowledge-based society there needs to be room for great ideas and good proposals to freely circulate. This is the energy which will fire the innovation engine. Governance and policy making need to take this up if the transformation into an Innovation Society is to be successful.

Speech from President Barroso on Europe's Innovation Policy

2009-10-19T23:05:00.005+02:00

Last week president Barroso gave a remarkable, forward looking speech to Parliament at the European Innovation Summit. He characterises how the knowledge society needs to be a driver of innovation and outlines the cornerstones of the future European innovation policy. This includes, amongst other things, the aspects of open innovation, of standardisation as a facilitator of innovation, and of the need for new, innovative models for IPR handling.

For more information see the Commission website on the Innovation Summit called Knowledge4Innovation where you can also view and download further information.

Addition of Oct 20:
The speech is now also available in transcript for reading - read on the Commission website or download as pdf.

Relevant link of today: Speech of Commissioner Kroes on competition policy and the role of standards and interoperability

2009-10-19T13:32:00.002+02:00

Last week Commissioner Kroes gave a speech at the Harvard Club of Belgium. The Commissioner addressed the full range of issues regarding competition policy and the benefits of standards and interoperability as well as issues regarding improvement of IPR handling in Standards Developing Organisations with mechanisms like patent disclosure etc. I would like to highlight the following three passages from Commissioner Kroes' speech here:

Following her speech on open standards from 2008, Commissioner Kroes stressed:

In essence, standards are good because they create the level playing field on which all can compete. More than that, good standard-setting helps consumers, boosts competitiveness and can spur market growth. Remember, for example, the wide-spread benefits of some of the most common standards in everyday use I am thinking of the GSM standard for mobile phone, Internet protocols, the magnetic stripe on various ID and banking cards, MPEG for videos and podcasts.

Commissioner Kroes continued emphasizing the benefits of open and transparent standardisation for competitiveness and innovation:

If standardisation processes are open and transparent, then standards can bring significant benefits to consumers by ensuring compatibility between products, which will generate competition on price and innovation.

And on interoperability the Commissioner pointed out:

Standards may facilitate economies of scale, but it is with interoperability that they really add value to the economy. Standards are the foundation of interoperability – they create the level playing field needed for interoperability, where all can compete. When good standard-setting allows everyone to interoperate, it is also more likely that consumers will get the sort of high-quality and innovative products that work in a wide range of situations.

To some extend the speech reads like the resumée of Commissioner Kroes' term of office of the last 5 years. It is worth reading the full speech on the Commissions website or download from there in pdf format. (All quotes above from the Commission website)

You need a new suit once in a while, don't you...

2009-10-16T14:01:00.002+02:00

I decided to give my blog a new look today. I find it a bit more modern and clear. Hope you like it too and further enjoy browsing by here. Have a nice weekend everyone. I will enjoy the days off after a rather busy week and will enjoy the sports and culture events in which my kids are performing this weekend. So business will go on, but in different domains. Cheers...

World Standards Day on EXPRESS: some snippets

2009-10-15T17:40:00.002+02:00

Yesterday was World Standards Day. And it was on EXPRESS – the expert panel on the revision of the European standardisation system. See my blog post of Oct 6 for the announcement and in particular the link to the EXPRESS issues paper that had been prepared as input to yesterday's conference.

The conference was over all a success. At least if you count in participants. The large conference theatre in Charlemagne was not full, but well and densely populated. And the entire community of standards folks was around – the usual suspects and a good many more.

You couldn't really say that the conference did bring forth new breakthrough thinking. It was to a large extend rather a reconfirmation of the topics and issues that have been identified and are being discussed by the EXPRESS panel. This is good because it shows that the EXPRESS panel is capturing the critical items. There were no controversies, which might be due to the fact that participation from the audience was very much restricted to asking questions rather than bringing up ideas or criticism.

Several of the panelists were in positioning-mode rather than in visionary or brainstorming-mode. So the benefits of the ESOs and the current European standardisation system were stressed a lot with pointing at the needs to improve cooperation and the needs for global standards.

So here's what I personally take away as essentials from the conference:

The critical issues that societies, or if you like: mankind, are facing in the next decade are around the environment, climate change, water and energy supply, optimisation and efficiency. Standardisation can help in finding smarter ways of doing things and getting processes and supply-chains better connected and optimised. The consequence to me is: What is needed is a mechanism to systematically support the integration of technologies via standards, the combination of standards into complex systems for solving the pressing issues described and foster innovative.
Costas Andropoulos, Head of Commission Unit D4, gave a first overview on the comments the Commission received on the white paper on “Modernisation of the ICT standardisation policy in Europe”. The feedback is highly supportive to the Commission recommendations. Main areas where most comments were submitted include the list of attributes and their implementation; IPR; the composition of the platform. Costas explained that the Commission will now work on analysing the comments and taking them into account for the revision of the Council Decision. And he stressed that the Commission will submit a revised Council Decision in spring 2010 and that this time table even needs to be kept in case EXPRESS results should not be ready by then since further time should not be lost.
Peter Brown, Executive Director of OASIS, pointed out that he and the OASIS Board of Directors see themselves not primarily as representing an organisation but as providing a platform for stakeholders to efficiently develop standards. I like this service provider attitude very much.
The discussion around innovation was, to my mind, too much limited to the issue of transferring research results into standardisation. This is only one aspect of innovation. A broader view on innovation is needed taking into account the implementation of standards and the innovation on top of standards, e.g. for integrating technologies as described above. This innovation potential where open standards play a key role needs to be taken up by an effective European innovation policy.

And here's some criticism of the conference which I picked up in coffee break discussions:

Some people were disappointed that there were no real progressive or visionary thinking;
Some people were disappointed that there was a lack of representation of speakers in supporting open standards, more open and community oriented approaches;
Some people thought that the discussions were not lively enough.

Thought leadership from OpenForum Europe: Seven key elements for the reform of the European Standardisation System

2009-10-12T10:22:00.002+02:00

OpenForum Europe published today a strategic discussion paper listing "Seven Key Elements for a Modernised European Standardisation System". This is in the context of work of the European Commission on reforming the European standardisation system and the EU ICT standards policy.

As I mentioned in my last blog post, this week, on world standards day, there will be an open conference on the reform of the European standardisation system taking into account the work of the EXPRESS panel.

Secondly, in early summer this year, the Commission had published a white paper on the modernisation of the ICT standardisation policy for Europe (see also my blog entry from early July).

The discussion paper from OpenForum Europe provides some breakthrough and pragmatic thinking on required reform steps. The "seven key elements" include aspects like

positioning Europe in a globalised world;
making effective use of open standards developed by global open standards organisations and fora;
identifying additional roles for the National Standards Organisations in Europe;
promoting innovation and growth with open standars;
looking at the societal dimension of standardisation;
striving for more open and transparent processes in standards development and consensus building.

Read the full article on the OFE website or download the strategic discussion paper directly from there.

World Standards Day- EU Commission workshop on EXPRESS

2009-10-06T15:09:00.002+02:00

The European Commission is dedicating this year's world standards day for discussing the work and tasks of the Expert Panel on the Revision of the European Standardisation System (EXPRESS).

The conference title is forward looking: "European Standardisation for the next decade". It will be held on October 14, 2009, in Brussels in the Charlemagne Building. Registration is now open and the agenda can be downloaded on the respective Commission website.

For the basis of the discussion at the conference, the EXPRESS group has produced an Issue Paper which is available online for download.

This Issue Paper outlines the key challenges and elements that are discussed in EXPRESS and that have been identified as critical for the future European standardisation system. Apart from organisational and financial issues these include most notably globalisation, standardisation and innovation, services and the relation to global standards development organisations. The focal question is, of course, in which way public policies should be refocussed to better address issues around standardisation and to better use standards for achieving and promoting the respective policy objective. Moreover, it needs to be decided which changes need to be made to the European legal framework on standardisation, above all to Directive 98/34.

The Commission explicitly invites all interested parties to submit comments to the EXPRESS Issue Paper.

German general elections

2009-09-28T10:33:00.003+02:00

So Germany voted. Yesterday. New Bundestag, which is our federal parliament and which will elect the new chancellor. Which will be the old chancellor but in a new coalition - not with the Social Democrats anymore but with the Liberal Democrats. Congratulations to chancellor Merkel and the winning parties.

Almost needless to give a link or viewing the final result of the election. I's everywhere in the German press today. So here's just one for the FAZ online site with the election results.

There's one remarkable result and that is the amount of support which the new German Piratenpartei (Pirate Party) managed to get. They got roughly 2% of the votes cast. This is not enough for sending a representative into the parliament. But with around 2% they are the largest group of those "other" parties who are below the clipping level. And with the young and digitally educated people the Piratenpartei has got a huge support of over 10%. So no wonder that they were very happy with the election results as is reported, for instance, by Die Zeit. In some university towns with a strong technical focus they got more than 3%.

The Piratenpartei is bringing up new topics - almost all, so far, focussing on issues around the internet, copyright, patents, etc. They reach out to the generation internet to some extend.

In a recent article in the German FAZ Sonntagszeitung Frank Schirrmacher, chief editor of the Feuilleton, gave a very informative and forward looking analysis of the Piratenpartei and of nerds in general.

After yesterday's election, the Piratenpartei is certainly a group that can't be ignored anymore. Time will show whether it's a new party on the horizon like the Greens were 30+ years ago. But I'm sure that the polical establishment will, from now on, take a closer look at the generation internet.

On Blogging or A New Era in the Transformation of the Public Sphere

2009-09-23T17:39:00.002+02:00

Blogging is fun and reading blogs is a great source of information and a great way for debating topics and exchanging views on certain issues. I have recently had several chats with people who are not yet into blogosphere and who wonder whether it's worth entering or whether it's – bluntly spoken – a waste of time.

The success of blogging is amazing, I think. But it's not really surprising. I see blogging as well as all the other web 2.0 technologies of collaboration and social networking very much as a new level in what the German sociologist and philosopher Juergen Habermas called The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. And I would be as presumptions to say that with blogging and the access to information and the exchange of information over the internet we are entering a new era of enlightenment. Blogs and networking platforms are a modern form of what the Salons were in the 18^th century.

Similarly, the success of blogging lies – at least partly – in the fact that blogging very much follows a centuries old maxim of writing. Derived from Horace's Ars poetica, line 333, the classicist writers and the public in the 17^th and 18^th century gave out the objectives of prodesse et delectare – “to be of use and to entertain” – for writing. Successful bloggers accommodate exactly that: they share useful information and provide useful, innovative thinking and at the same time they are extremely funny, witty and entertaining.

Writers and especially bloggers and internet users in general in our time have very much grasped the success factor of “prodesse et delectare”. In the flood of texts and information primarily those people are read which are able to attract their readers in some way. This means that rhetoric and it's instruments and what is called poetics are back on the agenda.

Blogging is powerful. The comparison to the age of enlightenment might sound heretical to some. But the blogosphere is read and heard and its role in influencing the development of public opinion making is constantly increasing.

Blogging has established its role in public discourse. It's the young, energetic, independent digitally educated people that heavily use the instrument of blogging and of social networking for discussing items of public interest.

Blogging and social networking will change the way our societies work and how social systems are transforming. Blogging and social networking are on the forefront of eParticipation and eDemocracy. And these new forms of communication and networking break the traditional constellations of the public, the poltical sphere, the media, etc.

There are opportunities and risks, for sure. But in the light of democracy blogging certainly is a new step towards a more open society. Blogging increasingly unveils our societies' potential for creative, innovative thinking and provides a new platform for public discourse.

So the response to those sceptical about blogging should probably be: embrace it, get involved, and find your personal way and style to join in playing in the public sphere. Don't ignore it, you will miss a lot of creativity and insights if you do so.

Future internet in a globalised world: spoken web

2009-09-17T09:05:00.002+02:00

There is an interesting project running in IBM Research: it is about creating a spoken web in parallel to the world wide web:

The World Wide Web is perhaps the greatest technology innovation the world has seen in the last few decades. It has created the largest repository of information, opened new streams of businesses, and transformed the way people communicate. The World Wide Web has helped eliminate geographical barriers and paved the way for global collaboration and integration. All done with a few clicks on our computers.

Unfortunately, a majority of the population on this planet does not have computers or connectivity to the Internet. And the chances of that changing any time soon is probably a distant dream.

The basic principle of Spoken Web lies in creating a system analogous to the World Wide Web using a technology most of us all have in common - speech. Spoken Web helps people create voice sites using a simple telephone, mobile or landline. The user gets a unique phone number which is analogous to a URL and when other users access this voice site they get to hear the content uploaded there. Interestingly, all these voice sites can be interlinked creating a massive network, which can work like the World Wide Web.

Sounds very exciting to me. I could imagine collaboration platforms and social networking platforms emerge in such a spoken web. And in combination with speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies this could even be interlinked with platforms like Twitter. And it might be a further way of overcoming digital divide.

See the website of the IBM India Research Lab for the full article on this project.

Relevant link of today: European Parliament approves second term for EC chief Barroso

2009-09-16T14:12:00.002+02:00

It's broadly in the news today. The Sofia Echo gives a pretty detailed report online:

European Parliament approves second term for EC chief Barroso
European Commission President Jose Barroso won a second term in office in a European Parliament vote on September 16 2009, although Greens and the socialist bloc held to their opposition to him.

Of the 736 members of the European Parliament, 718 were present for the vote; 382 voted in favour, 219 against and there were 117 abstentions. [...]

Read the full article on the Sofia Echo website.

Relevant link of today: Handelsblatt on use of IBM Lotus Symphony as office software

2009-09-11T15:35:00.002+02:00

The German newspaper Handelsblatt published an interesting article today on IBM LotusSymphony as office software and on IBM using Symphony in-house throughout worldwide. The article starts a bit "thrilling" but is definitely worth reading:

"Lotus Symphony
IBM wirft MS Office raus
von Axel Postinett

IBM verschärft den Kampf um die Büroarbeitsplätze der Zukunft und geht dabei den Konkurrenten Microsoft an: Die Mitarbeiter des US-Computerkonzerns müssen auf die hauseigene Bürolösung umsteigen. Die Propagandisten von freier Software hoffen auf eine Signalwirkung.
[...]"

Read the full article online at the Handelsblatt website.

Dilbert on standards

2009-09-07T15:03:00.002+02:00

Being back from vacation - Yes, thanks, I had a great time. We spent two weeks at the Mediterranean coast in the South of France. Fantastic!! Wonderful landscape, wonderful sea, great food, great people - all you need for a relaxing time. And of course time was flying....

So again, being back from vacation I found, in my in-box, several mails from colleagues pointing me at the recent Dilbert cartoons on standardisation. Please take a look how Dilbert sees the world of standards ... and, as always, there is more than a glimpse of truth in Dilbert:

- cartoon of Aug 31
- cartoon of Sep 1
- cartoon of Sep 2

Have fun ...

PS: I hope you all had a great summer, too, with nice and inspiring vacations.

Knowledge Society - Part I

2009-08-20T21:13:00.003+02:00

In a recent meeting the current Cenelec president, Dietmar Harting, made an excellent proposal: To start in Europe a programme "Knowledge Society" similar to the programme "Information Society" that was launched in the middle of the 90s.

Dietmar is absolutely correct: societies and economies in Europe are transforming from the information society to the knowledge society. This is can be seen as the central movement into this new millenium. And Europe should react on this and become a driver in the transformation process.

I understand that different units and directorates in the European Commission are already considering an initiative along these lines. The critical issue is, of course, what constitutes this transformation, what are key elements of the knowledge society, and what focus should such a programme have.

Over the next couple of weeks I will start a bit of brainstorming, for sure with a focus on openness and standardisation, but not necessarily limited to that. This is definitely an exciting topic. Being successful in the Knowledge Society means being successful in globalisation.