Open Standards NZ Co-signers

The undersigned have all agreed that the New Zealand government should create a level playing field for software by mandating that all software procurement, particularly of commercial-off-the-shelf software, only considers software complying with open standards that are vendor-neutral, royalty-free and unencumbered by patents.

Where no relevant open standard exists, the government should undertake to develop suitable open standards, building on those already available elsewhere.

The goal is for software suppliers to the NZ government to compete to meet government-specified open standards rather than competing to set their own proprietary standard as is currently common practise.

# Name Organisation Comment Submitted
41 Alan Falloon 9 Jun 2016 16:55
42 Mike Cowie 8 Jun 2016 20:44
43 Eion Robb 8 Jun 2016 20:43
44 Robert Collins In ICT the ability to use Free/Libre/Open source is a big competitive edge, as demonstrated by many web companies revolutionising the world today. For NZ to reap those benefits, it is essential that suppliers are able to compete on a level playing field rather than being forced to work with private "standards" which are designed to advantage their owner, rather than being a commons. Case studies that come to mind: - the UK experience - The Australian tax office submission headaches - Cost if e.g. voter registration forms were microsoft office templates 3 Mar 2016 10:35
45 Blake Burgess 2 Mar 2016 19:53
46 Mark Foster Jazzed Solutions Ltd The use of open standards that are universally accepted and able to be viewed both cross-platform and cross-generation should be an obvious move for Government. 29 Jan 2016 17:10
47 Shaun McGirr Need success stories to capture attention of policy makers: agency A adopted a certain open standard and look at the good it did! 9 Dec 2015 09:52
48 Jim Cheetham 16 Nov 2015 09:03
49 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd 16 Nov 2015 08:57
50 Donald Johnston I have experienced problems in the past with my children's school requiring assignments to be submitted in Microsoft Office format which is a non-standard format. Parents should not have any need to purchase proprietary office software when there is very good free alternative software (e.g. Libre Office) which is completely standards compliant. 15 Nov 2015 22:03
51 Rob Pearson IT manager of company with over 700 staff NZ government (and District Health Boards) are behaving anti-competitively, have a strong history of being closed to open computing standards, please stop being an embarrassing laggard in this regard, here are just 2 examples and both are easily fixed: -NZ uses standards for '2' editable document file formats, 'both' controlled by the same single vendor, a better and single file format has existed for a decade now. The UK government sorted this one out https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government. -Mandating that business partners use Microsoft Internet Explorer to work within their contracts, this is outrageous in 2015. 27 Sep 2015 12:40
52 Guy Kloss Mega Limited 8 Sep 2015 14:49
53 David Thompson University of Canterbury 5 Sep 2015 16:27
54 Nicholas Phillips Alternatively, as a very minimum, include cost of migrating data away from any tendered solution in the assessed cost of implementation of that solution. 5 Sep 2015 11:43
55 Pikiora Wylie 16 Aug 2015 21:05
56 Imogen Grace 10 Aug 2015 12:21
57 Elena Kondrateva 6 Aug 2015 23:46
58 David Stewart 5 Aug 2015 06:20
59 Daniel Strypey Bruce Disintermedia.net.nz RadioNZ publishes all their archived radio material in the open Ogg Vorbis format, as well as the patent-encumbered (but more common) MP3 format. People can access this publicly-funded material using any internet-capable device, running any operating system, because there is no barrier-to-entry stopping developers from creating Ogg Vorbis support. This is just one example of the benefits of public organisations supporting open standards. 3 Aug 2015 09:54
60 Mark Harris Independent consultant Any organisation, public or private, should be moving to open standards for information retention and reuse, for accessibility and for security. Open standards enable access to historical information (can you still read the WordPerfect documents you wrote in 1989?) as well as the documents of the future. The world is moving towards interoperability - you can't do that when you're bound to a particular vendor who doesn't play well with others and will, by default, use their own, proprietary format. It doesn't matter which vendor you are thinking of, or what type of software or data, there are open alternatives that you should be using to enable sharing or your and other organisation's information. 31 Jul 2015 23:33
61 Robin de Haan The New Zealand Government should commit to open standards and not be prepared to trade them away. 31 Jul 2015 21:40
62 Abhishek Reddy 31 Jul 2015 18:36
63 Tony Dale University of Canterbury 30 Jul 2015 11:16
64 Konstantin Pastbin personal 29 Jul 2015 21:10
65 Robert Hunt Sole trader 29 Jul 2015 15:03
66 Byron Cochrane Land Information New Zealand The promotion of open standards is fundamental to my work in promoting a national Spatial Data Infrastructure. To better and more efficiently leverage resources that already exist, encourage the creation of needed data that does not, and to provide a platform that increases the value and reliability of these data and the systems supporting their access, open standards are prerequisite. 29 Jul 2015 14:36
67 Jan Larres 29 Jul 2015 08:51
68 William Gordon Horizons Regional Council For the sake of Digital Continuity, open standards must become the standard for government information. 28 Jul 2015 11:40
69 Quentin Pidduck Technologywise Ltd The availability and community behind open source projects can mean that at the end of the day it's a wiser solution than proprietary software anyway. 27 Jul 2015 20:14
70 Adrian Croucher 27 Jul 2015 16:57
71 donald callum robertson 27 Jul 2015 09:40
72 Nigel Bovey 26 Jul 2015 20:58
73 Richard Dougherty 25 Jul 2015 23:05
74 Tony Bray Personal The whole of the NZ government should mandate open standards in all software and digital media. This should include Education, Health, Employment, Law, et al. 25 Jul 2015 11:33
75 Ben McKenzie Presbyterian Support Otago 25 Jul 2015 10:19
76 Dom Tupu Sole Trader 24 Jul 2015 16:43
77 Hugh Gordon Cooper Retired State Servant 24 Jul 2015 16:32
78 Grant Paton-Simpson Paton-Simpson & Associates Ltd Requiring open standards is good for the purchasers of software such as government. It also levels the playing field so that New Zealand companies can fairly compete with international software companies. Single-word answer for why we should be following open standards? Flash! 24 Jul 2015 07:23
79 Gabriella Turek self 23 Jul 2015 17:48
80 Roderick Francis David Aldridge As a user of the Linux operating system I have had problems communicating with some government electronic services. I have had to resort to mail. 23 Jul 2015 17:46