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Denmark becomes first open standards country
December 10, 2007, iGovernment Bureau
The Government of Denmark has mandated that all national, regional and local government bodies and associations of Danish regions move to open standards for software from January 1, 2008. Open standards are defined in terms of their capacity to be fully documented, publicly available, and freely implementable without economic, political or legal constraints. The agreement requires that all authorities are able to receive documents in two standards, ODF (Open Document Format) and OOXML (Open Office XML), which will allow citizens to communicate with the government using open standards. The county's decision to shift to open standards is aimed at fostering competition in the software market, as well as at increasing effectiveness in the public sector and efficiency in task flow between various systems and organisations.