Open Standards

The purpose of this grass-roots group is to achieve a well defined, sensible plan for NZ to adopt vendor neutral, royalty free open standards across government.  We need to develop and refine our arguments, and determine the best ways to influence government to mandate the adoption of open standards to create a level playing field on which software vendors can compete fairly, for the benefit of our citizens, our industry, and our economy.

The NZ government has been handing software vendors monopolies to exploit for long enough. We need to ensure that our government - whose expenditure currently makes up more than half of NZ's domestic software expense - is creating incentives for software suppliers to compete to meet an independent standard rather than the status quo, which is to compete to set a proprietary, vendor-specific non-standard. We must also help the government change from its current practise, brought about by the widespread and probably unintentional use of exclusionary proprietary file formats, network protocols, and APIs, of unwittingly mandating that citizens use vendor-specific software products simply in order to comply with legally required reporting and collaboration.

We will be creating content for a new website, which will provide a common reference for our conversation, and place to record our distilled wisdom for the benefit of our NZ government policy makers.