apc.au blog

March 26th, 2008 is the inaugural Document Freedom Day, a global event to raise awareness of the importance of the Open Document Format. Open standards are crucial to allow diverse computer applications to exchange information and for that information to outlive the application that originally created it.

Many of us have experienced the pain of trying to access information created in now obsolete products (anyone remember Wordstar?). We’ve also tried to share documents between other organisations and seen the formatting disasters and corruptions that can occur (MS Word to Lotus, for example?). How about those who have received a document written in the latest version of MS Office but cannot read it because they’re running an older version?

Open document standards have been compared to the Rosetta stone as they allow us to unlock information. They also help promote competition as any application can work with them and, perhaps most importantly, help prevent vendor lock-in. No one organisation should have control over how your store your information.

For our part, apc.au are going to make available 10 years of essays, lectures, reports and articles dealing with information communication technologies for cultural development (ICT4CD). We’ll be loading them onto our wiki in both open and portable document formats, these papers are available for sharing and re-publication under a Creative Commons Australia license. It’s going to take a while to get them all loaded, so we’ll drop progress reports here as time passes.

For now, spare a moment to think about how your information is stored. Can you share it easily with others? Will you be able to access it in the future? Maybe you should consider changing to an application that supports open standards? Food for thought

Update: Here are our links:

• Our media release
• The list of documents we’re making available
• Our DFD 08 wiki page