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
41 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.
42 Pikiora Wylie
43 Imogen Grace
44 Elena Kondrateva
45 David Stewart
46 Robin de Haan The New Zealand Government should commit to open standards and not be prepared to trade them away.
47 Abhishek Reddy
48 Jan Larres
49 Adrian Croucher
50 donald callum robertson
51 Nigel Bovey
52 Richard Dougherty
53 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.
54 Richard Hector
55 Harry Chapman Open standards are the way to ensure all citizens of New Zealand are able to open the files that the Government creates. We can do better!
56 Francois Marier
57 Reed Wade
58 Yuri de Groot
59 Tabitha Roder
60 Dave Horn
61 Terry Woods
62 Sam Bonner
63 Eliot Blennerhassett this is long overdue
64 David Barnett
65 Hilary Oliver
66 Mike Riversdale Access Granted NZ
67 Dave Koelmeyer Apertura Designs Limited
68 James Nisbet Bandit Design
69 Don Christie Catalyst IT
70 Daniel Reurich Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd Until we have mandatory vendor neutral open standards for government, there will always be additional impediments to interactions with the government. It's time things were rebalanced and vendors brought to heel, so that everybody can participate regardless of the technology they have access too.
71 Daniel Reurich Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd
72 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd
73 Glenn Ramsey Componic Ltd
74 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.
75 Dylan Reeve Dylan Reeve
76 Michelle Beavan Exess Connectivity Ltd
77 William Gordon Horizons Regional Council For the sake of Digital Continuity, open standards must become the standard for government information.
78 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.
79 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.
80 Colin Jackson Jackson Strategy Government spends a truly vast amount on IT. It is the biggest purchaser of IT in New Zealand. Yet, despite IT being NZ's second largest export, most of that spend goes to overseas companies due to lock-in practices by multinationals. Come on, NZ government, this isn't hard, just solve it the way other countries do, by requiring open standards so that all IT companies can compete.