 Is the first such seminar to be held under the banner of the Open Forum Academy. We decided to put substance ahead of style so we're actually doing this event before we've even launched our website. There will be a more formal launch of the OFA in New Yorktown. The reason we've done that is because our speaker Dr Laura Tarnladys has something new to say about an issue ysgol yw'r gwael i'r tyfan, gyda'r edrych yn gweithio'r gwaith yma. Felly, Llorra, sy'n ei ddweud y ysgol, a'i leidio i'r lawr ysgol, dyna'r gwael i'r gwael i'r prosiectau yng nghymru a sylfaenol. A she'n unrhyw gweithio'r gwael i'r gwael i'r gwael i'r gwael. It is flown over from Yale, especially for this event, to present her latest and yet yet unpublished paper, which is entitled E Governance, Policies, Interoperability and Open Standards. You should all have a copy in front of you and if you don't please speak up. Do you all have a copy? Several parts of the European Commission are looking at this area of standardisation at the moment. Llywodraeth i'r cyfnodd, y dyma, o'r prydau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau ynglyniadau, ond ein bod yn oeddodd yn y lleol yn y rhanau cyfnodd iawn yn yôl yma yn y gwrthgaf. Dydyn nhw i'n cael ei wneud o'r parlym yn ei hir o'r cofodd ynglyniadau a'r cyfnodd iawn ynglyniadau o'r gyfer ymloeddio a'r cwrsfyniadau i'r cyfnodd iawn yn ei wneud o'r cyfnodd iawn. As moderator, it's my job not only just to keep time, but I want to try and structure this seminar so that everyone here goes away with something useful. Although we call ourselves a academy, I don't want this to be a dry academic lecture. No thanks to the academic present. After Laura has summarised the bulk of her paper, I'd like to give the floor briefly to Bjorn Lundell, who is an associate professor at the University of Skirblur, I hope I pronounced that right, in Sweden, for a short peer review of the paper. Bjorn is another of our founding fellows. I will then ask Laura to take the wet again and discuss her recommendations, which form about a third of her year of rule paper. This part of her presentation is, I believe, the part that is most likely to focus your thoughts. Once she has finished that, I want to have a discussion involving as many of you as possible. Most of the questions will naturally be directed to her, but I hope that it develops into a two-way conversation. Many of you who agreed to come today have strong feelings about the issues covered in Laura's paper. I hope that you have the courage to express them here. And to encourage you to speak up, we are applying what's called the Chatham House Rules, which basically means that if there are journalists, bloggers, twitterers, is that the right word? Tweeters, whatever, present, it means that you can take quotes from here, but you cannot attribute to any person unless you go and actually speak to that individual and ask permission directly. And the idea really is to encourage people to speak up and to feel that they're not going to be held to account unless they want to be. So, enough of the introductions, Laura. Thank you very much, Paul. I'm going to use the microphone just so I don't disappoint you with your expectation of a dry academic lecture. So, but thank you very much for that kind introduction and in keeping the academic sale, I'll try to keep my remarks below less than an hour and a half. I'm just kidding. I really hope to have a lot of discussion today. And I also want to say that I don't feel that there's really that much new in my paper. I think what it does is it synthesizes what I think is the best of what's already out there in terms of the government interoperability frameworks. And it's as yet an unpublished, it's not formally a published paper. So, this is a wonderful opportunity for me to gain some feedback and to hopefully find something that's missing in the paper so that I can add it. But I'm really looking forward to the discussion part. I also want to thank Graham for inviting me here and his colleagues. I very much appreciate the opportunity to not only be here, but to be in Brussels. It's very beautiful weather. It feels like New York weather. It's a bit humid, but I am very happy to be here. So, thank you very much for the invitation. So, I think what I will do is I will divide my initial remarks into two sections. The first topic that I'd like to open up is the topic of the increasing linkage between standards and governance and why it's in the best interest of governance to promote open standards. That's the whole first line of discussion. The second topic is the question of, so what do we do about it? What is the appropriate role of governments and standards, including the possibility of exerting influence over standardization processes through procurement and, in particular, a procurement vehicle of the government interoperability framework that is taking place all over the world right now. It's very fascinating to watch that unfold. So, I've done a series of case studies. I'll discuss that just a little bit. We'll see how much time we have if I just focus on one of the cases. So, what do I mean by standards? Normally I have to address that question not so much in this room, but I notice I had to use an adapter when I plugged in my laptop. That's an example of not open standards. But what really we're talking about in this paper is information and communication technology standards. They're not software. They're just blueprints. They're the specifications or blueprints that provide common data formats, common network characteristics, and software interfaces so that devices made by different manufacturers can communicate. I'm sure many people in this room remember back before we had interoperability standards for information and communication technologies. Computing devices made by one manufacturer couldn't communicate with those made by another manufacturer. So, with it through that world, those were proprietary standards and there's a lot more openness now than there ever has been. But openness is not a given. There are a lot of examples of proprietary standards in various characteristics that I'll discuss later. Examples of open standards. On this list, a few, it's an acronym soup. It's lots and lots of acronyms. But just to give a few examples of common open standards, the TCPIP standards that underlie the internet transmission control protocol, internet protocol is what that stands for. Another example of an internet standard that's open is HTTP that allows web communications between a client and a server. So that's hypertext transfer protocol. And open document format is another example of an open standard. So that's a type of document file format. These are just to name a few. But when a standard is openly published and it's available to implement in new products, it can result in what? It results in multiple competing products and therefore rapid technological innovation. And I'll just quote one legal scholar, a colleague of mine, who said, the most formidable regulatory regime that is governed in the internet to date is the institution of open standards that has allowed the internet to grow exponentially as a network of networks. So one rationale for promoting openness and standards is this direct linkage to national innovation policy and economic competition. So that's one important linkage. A great deal of economic research supports this whole notion that an open approach in which standards are freely published and available to use with either no intellectual property restrictions or at least minimal IP restrictions maximizes innovation and produces this desirable economic effect of full market competition among the suppliers of ICT products and services. So already you see the problem with the acronyms. I've used ICT as intellectual property and as internet protocol. So you can see how in the halls of Yale Law School it's very confusing. We don't know if we need intellectual property or internet protocol on any given day. You have to be careful with these acronyms. But in regard to the innovation, this idea of being able to access and freely implement standards in products, it is directly relevant to the ability of the nations, private institutions to be able to compete and develop products and sell them on a global market. So that's one sense of the economic connection between openness and innovation. But along the same lines of economic considerations, standards are also directly related to international trade, the core function of governments. So if you think about the WTO's technical barriers to trade agreement, it does really emphasize that international standards play a role in international trade. But unfortunately standards can also serve as impediments to global trade and we see this happen in various places around the world particularly through intellectual property restrictions where if a standard is not open, it actually can restrict trade. So apart from these economic advantages, I did also want to mention and I talked about this in the paper that there are more political reasons for openness also and political and social reasons because of the public interest effects of standards. Most people think that standards are just a technical design decision. But actually they have very core public policy implications. I'll just give a few examples of how standards can shape policy in very unexpected ways. So what would be a good example? Accessibility standards for the disabled, that's one area. Also the area of encryption standards, which really are very fascinating to study because they reflect competing social values. On one hand, they protect privacy. On the other hand, there are some restrictions on encryption because of law enforcement and national security values. So oftentimes standards are a site of conflict between these competing values and the design decisions in them make decisions about the kind of world we want to live in. So that's a direct linkage with governance. And right now in the United States and certainly not only in the United States but also in the United States, there are also e-health standards. This is fascinating to watch unfold because these decisions that are being made and primarily by private industry who are involved in standards-studying consortia, they are going to determine how we access health care and the privacy that we have in electronic health records and other aspects of e-health. So these are just a few examples of how standards can shape policy in unexpected ways. It's not a form of public policy, but it's a form of public policy that is set by private industry to a certain extent rather than by legislature. So this is very, very, very fascinating to be part of both on the technical side and on the governance side. What's the political question here? So one political question is what are the responsibilities of governments to at least promote or encourage conditions that create some legitimacy for these institutions, private forms of institution, to be setting public policy? So we have private institutions setting policy in areas that traditionally has been done by governments. So what are the conditions by which they can set those to ensure some kind of legitimacy or oversight? There's also a third more direct linkage, actually, between standards and governance. And this has to do with the whole issue of e-government services and in some countries open government initiatives. So interoperability standards really are an underpinning of many, many different government functions, including a variety of services directly to citizens, including internal exchange within governments and between and among government agencies, and also a variety of functions like interoperable first responder services and various law enforcement functions. So obviously we live in an age in which information and communication technologies enable all of those things. So the standards are very relevant to core government functions. And this is a very multi-stakeholder issue, which is interesting because many information systems, whether e-health as I mentioned or intelligent grid systems, transportation systems, they are not controlled by any one entity anymore. Neither government nor the non-profit sector nor private industry controls the entirety of these systems. So this heightens the need to have open technologies and a high degree of transparency. Just to describe one more example of the link between governance and standards. This has to do with when there are problems with standards. Not everything goes well all the time. So when there's a software incompatibility resulting from lack of openness and standards, it can create public safety concerns as well as loss of faith in government. In the United States one of the best examples of this happened quite a while ago when a rocket a NASA rocket crashed because of a trajectory error resulting from two different standards. Now this happened to be an English system versus a metric system relevant information and communication technology standards but there are a lot of examples of this, not as dramatic but there are examples of this in ICTs also. The one that jumps to my mind is the incompatibility among document formats in the wake of the Asian tsunami that resulted in some documents not being able to be exchanged in the aftermath where there was identification of the dead a lot of tracking going on. So this was a highly publicized problem with standards that is quoted quite often. That was back in 2004, wasn't it? But I'll just give one more example. Critical infrastructure protection and the linkage between that and standards is very, very core. So there are a lot of protocol which is just another word for standards. There are protocol vulnerabilities that can be exploited and can create problems and impede government functions. In 2007 we had an example of this when a distributed denial of service attack exploited some protocol vulnerabilities and took down servers in Estonia. The political circumstance there was when they took down a military statue. There were some protests in the real world but there were also protests online. So some of the government servers as well as private servers were taken down. So considering these both public interest effects of standards but also the economic externalities of standards considering the direct linkage between governance and standards it's not surprising that governments are taking a much more active role in developing interoperability frameworks and in particular promoting open technical standards. There are many rationales for this. So that brings up the second area of discussion that I wanted to bring up. This is the question of what's the appropriate role of government in standardization. So in my paper I actually lay out a spectrum of various roles for governments in standardization. I go through involvement in development of standards, oversight or regulation of standards, funding and then this issue of procurement and adoption of standards in government technology infrastructures and that's really what I do focus on in this particular paper. But different standards, you can't overly generalize all of this because different standards depending on the public interest implications and depending on their functionality they can compel different levels of government involvement. There are some standards that really are directly related to national security or political processes. These historically really require a high degree of government involvement and oversight. There are other standards that are very dry and disemboddy, they may not require as much of involvement in governments. But what I try to do in this paper is provide the spectrum of different roles for governments to influence standardization. But I emphasize how as parts of markets and particularly in the developing world as a very large segment of ICT purchases governments really can effectively use this mechanism of procurement policies and adoption to promote openness and standards to achieve these positive externalities and enhance functionality that I described earlier. Historically governments have had a role in standards regulation. That's just factual. Whether regulating disability standards or using civil and criminal law to restrict certain practices or to restrict technologies that facilitate copyright violations. This is a role that government plays. Most governments have had a role in antitrust concerns. There are many many issues here related to regulation. But what I want to point out is that there is another much less beneficial or much less solitary sense in which governments directly intervene in standards. And this is not a legislative intervention but it's a technical intervention or procedural when governments through the use of proprietary specifications actually force citizens to use a specific software application or hardware device in order to communicate or leak governments or gain public information. So I call this a government standards mandate when a government forces a citizen to use a specific technology because of a proprietary specification. So this is exactly the opposite of mandating or encouraging open standards which inherently provides user choice and interoperability and choice of manufacturer's device. So the proprietary mandate that does happen sometimes can have a lot of unintended side effects but one of them is compelling citizens to use a specific technology which can be a problem from the standpoint of democratic principles as well as efficiency arguments and can just have other effects of just creating vendor lock-in. So there's also the issue of standards development and funding. In the majority of areas of ICTs governments, if you look historically at this do not monolithically develop standards but they do become involved in standards development sending representatives to various standard-setting bodies and representing the requirements of governments in these bodies. In other cases, governments can identify the need for a standard or for identifying the need for increased interoperability in a particular area and encourage private industry to develop a standard in this area or to provide recommendations. There are a lot of different ways that governments can get involved there and what I want to focus on now is the issue of procurement. So just a few thoughts about government influence over standards through this area of procurement and adoption. As I mentioned before, governments are enormous purchasers of ICTs and there's a lot of data to back this up but some of the most interesting data has to do with the percentage in the developing world of government procurement of ICTs versus other sectors so there's a great opportunity here to exert some influence. So in my opinion, it's kind of the rationale why did I write this paper. I think there's an opportunity here and I'll state it this way that governments have a special responsibility or obligation to generally procure products based on open standards because of these economic and political effects and implications that I mentioned earlier. So the rationale is not just for these political and economic implications but just technical efficiency and to foster an environment which competition and economic entrepreneurship can flourish. So there are a lot of different rationales but as such these procurement policies based on open standards should be part of the national innovation policy. So I'll just say a few words about this. I think the way I'll do it is by giving an example of one of the government interoperability frameworks that is in existence right now. In this paper I actually give some brief case studies. I talked about the South Africa example, Brazil example, the European Union's interoperability framework for the regional version of that and also Japan. There are other examples that could have been used here but I'll talk a little bit about South Africa. So the name of the South African strategic framework is called MIOS, the Minimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in Government. And what this does is it provides some mandatory standards and policies to which individual South African government agencies must adhere. So I'll give a few characteristics of this framework and then when we come back to the recommendations part of the discussion we can discuss these again also. So a few aspects of the South African framework that I think are interesting. One is that it emphasizes and presents certain principles. It goes through things like market support, scalability, cost effectiveness and security as well as openness. And this is something that a lot of the frameworks do is they provide these guiding principles that the interoperability framework and the associated products should adhere to. Another interesting aspect of this framework in South Africa is that the scope is quite broad in that it doesn't only address intergovernment communications but it addresses communications between government and citizens. So basically between government sectors and a variety of external entities, not just citizens. So a few other thoughts about this and this is different than some of the other interoperability frameworks. The standards that they are specifying actually apply both to new government procurements and also to legacy systems. So I'll just quote from the document. Legacy systems will need to comply with these standards. So it's not just for new procurements but bringing everything up to the suit code. They also divide the standards into different layers. This seems to be something that's common among the government interoperability frameworks also. We're used to this seven-layer model that seems to have stuck around for years and years but there are just an infinite number of taxonomies in which to allocate standards. The South African example uses three layers of interoperability. One is the issue of interconnection, one is data interoperability, and one is information access. So that's the way they do it. Okay, another characteristic is that this framework gives a definition of an open standard. So they actually define the criteria that should be met for a standard to be considered open. And I will just give a few examples of what they say. Should be an open decision-making process, the standard should be maintained by a non-commercial organization. There should be an open access policy, meaning that not only the standard itself but the documents and supporting work leading up to the standard should be transparently made available. It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute, and use the standard free of cost. So that's an interesting criterion. And in this case they have a policy about the intellectual property rights underlying standards. Their policy is that basically they should be available on a revocable, royalty free basis. So this is an interesting question also about the intellectual property rights. They also have a criterion that there should be multiple competing implementations of a standard. So they have this criterion of, well, the standard they use. Are there multiple products that this standard is based upon? So that's part of the criteria also. And one final thought about this South African framework is that it does actually include a list of standards. So it's possible to not include a list of standards or you can put the specifications in the interoperability framework. In this case it's 10 pages of standards and talk about your acronyms. This is where you could really glaze over and take a nap when you start reading these. But I do want to just mention a few to get, so that you get a flavor of the level of detail that they put in this. So here are just a few examples. For internet message formats, they're recommending mine, different versions of mine, so multi-purpose internet mail extensions. So I'll be quizzing you on these acronyms after. For directory services, lightweight directory access protocol, or LDAP, is to be used for general purpose directory user access. For IT encapsulation, they use security encapsulating security payload. So you kind of get a sense of this. So this is where translating these important political and economic values into the actual technology choices can be a big leap because you get into the arcane world of what the standards actually are. And I think that's why it is important to have the actual standards specified in the framework. But we'll talk about recommendations in a moment. Now, a lot of the other frameworks have similar elements in their government interoperability frameworks, but they also differ in certain areas. So some of the distinguishing characteristics among the options for approaches to interoperability frameworks include the following. Whether it provides guiding principles. Whether there's a working definition of open standards. Whether it lists the actual standards to which agencies must adhere in their technology products. And then I want to raise another distinguishing characteristic. This is whether there are guidelines for ensuring compliance. So I think this is one of the most important areas because how do you actually go from this list or even in a more disemboddied sense from a definition of open standards into actual practice? So making this leap, if you can't make the leap, then the framework is meaningless. So I wanted to raise the question of how you ensure this type of compliance. But before we get into this issue of actual recommendations for the framework, what I think we'll do now is turn it over to Bjorn because he's going to have some questions and commentary and then we can get into the discussion of recommendations for best practices in these frameworks. And most importantly, I look forward to the comments from the participants here. So it could be very interactive. But thank you very much for listening. I'll turn it over to my colleague Bjorn. Thanks very much, Laura. Thank you, Laura, for an interesting read. I have the pleasure to read this paper for some time, with some interest. Speaking from some experience of having done research into the practice in this area, it's very interesting to hear your views on the actual approach that you went through when you selected these frameworks. I mean, you surveyed a number of interoperability frameworks. Do you think there are other frameworks that could have been included into the framework as well, or is this the complete list of everything that is interesting? This is definitely the incomplete list because there are a lot of frameworks. I could have easily... maybe if I were just writing it this afternoon. Maybe I would put the India framework in for example. I mean, there are many things that could be in here, but I'll just answer the question by talking about part of the methodology. I was invited to a very useful meeting that was organized by the UNDP in Rio de Janeiro that brought together individuals from how many countries, maybe 30 countries, and it was... they brought people who were involved in the development of government interoperability frameworks in various countries, so I was able to participate in roundtable discussions, and that I think was more useful than reading the documents to hear about what people are going through in the trenches. So it was a matter of surveying the frameworks that are publicly available, and also meeting in working groups and hearing about what some of the... what works and what doesn't. But I also will answer it by saying, again, there are million ways that you could slice it into different countries to pick, but I did try to pick a country from different continents. So there's one from Asia, from Latin America to European interoperability frameworks. So I tried to have a certain degree of geographical diversity also. OK. Talking about standards, and open standards, you have, I think, carried far quite a lot from what you mean, but can you imagine a situation where you have an open standard which is the standard? That's a comment that I've heard sometimes. Or do you always see that the open standard is a subset of standards? This is a circular question. When is an open standard not a standard? OK. So there's the question of having a piece of paper. So this might be a standard. And if it's not in any products, then I would say that's when it's not a standard. So we could sit around for a few days and we can develop an open standard for something, but if it's not implemented in any products, then I think then it's not really a standard. It has to be translated into some products. And I think that's part of the reason why some of the interoperability frameworks include that criterion of there must be multiple competing products to actually be an open standard. Yeah. To me, it's also the issue of the standard has to have a specification which is complete and consistent. Because otherwise it's very difficult to actually implement that. So on about that. I think that as a product we say for being able to develop a product based on the standard. I understand. Yeah. You mentioned in the paper about the politics involved in the standard. We also think there is politics involved in implementing standard. I mean large products trying to claim conformance to standard. Is that also something that can be considered for different? Yeah, absolutely. I think the politics of standards adoption is just as important as the politics of the values that are designed into the standards. And in fact, once you have a standard that is implemented in products sometimes the values change because the standard can be adopted in various manners and adopted for different purposes. I'll give one example. To pick a standard, how about IPv6? The IPv6 standard that expands the internet addresses that are available. There's been a huge historical chronology of government policies towards adoption of IPv6. What's fascinating to me is that despite these policies I think the first one was in Japan where they said they were going to an entire IPv6 environment. What was it, 2000? I can't remember if that was the exact year. The Prime Minister of Japan actually talked about IPv6 before most people ever heard about it. Huge politics of adoption. But despite some of the political will for it it still is not really highly adopted. The political landscape there is so complicated because you can have political will for adoption but that doesn't necessarily mean that there will be an uptake in the actual standard. The adoption of a standard is even more fascinating sometimes than the questions that go into the design. Okay. Talking about the certification I'm thinking of the issue of who can actually certify and how to do that because if you go back to the SQL of magnitude the NIS in the US they had some conformance that they gave up on because it was too complex. Today happening with more recently about the standards or is there another way? A elaborate other question a little bit. NIST in the US they gave up on trying to provide these conformance tests. One way to make a standard transparent would be to provide for example an open reference implementation in other words that you demonstrated and made available in a form which can be interpreted by all. I mean if you talk about document formats for example some archiving associations around the world they actually recommend that in order to have a document format you have to have a GPL license and source reference implementation otherwise you should not adopt the National, Australia archiving association. The certification issue is I think a really complicated issue because in some ways by having an interoperability framework it's in a way a form of certification but that has to do with what can be implemented and used within government infrastructures and among governments and citizens. This is just my personal opinion I'm a little bit wary about certification efforts and standardisation because by definition there are very rapid development processes and the pace of change in ICTs but when you start introducing testing and certification and conformity if you do this in a very formal way I think that it can slow down the process of ICT development so I think it's a very big decision to get into something like that and I'm a little bit wary of it because it's slowing down the pace of innovation. I think we're going to intervene at that point Bill, thank you very much for those questions that's given us an academic analysis a little bit Before we move on to the recommendations I'm going to ask, I'm a former journalist I'm going to ask a journalistic question there's something you mentioned about the South Africa example which I found fascinating it looks like it's much more ambitious than the European interoperability framework I mean it's broad as a scope it's not just about intra-government as government to citizens it's also applied to legacy systems as you pointed out and it touches on compliance and these things seem to be absent in the European interoperability framework in the form that it seems to be taking at the moment Does Europe have are there things that we can learn from the South Africa example that you hear in Europe? So that's actually a great segue into the recommendations because I lay out some high level recommendations and I think there really needs to be a lot of fleshing out of each individual it's one thing to give a recommendation and it's another thing to say how do you actually adopt this but one of the areas that I strongly recommend is to actually define openness in the document if there's no definition of an open standard then it's nearly impossible to then go from the framework to an actual practice so recommendation number one would be to have a definition of what an open standard is now I know that different countries will come to different understandings of exactly what openness means in various contexts but I have a definition that I usually use which I'll share very briefly I think there should be openness in three different contexts one context is open in development one is open in implementation and one is openness and use so by openness and development that just means that the standard should be developed in a participatory process there should be a certain degree of transparency so if this were really only a technical issue then how the standard was developed shouldn't really matter but if one believes that there are political implications of standards then the process by which the standard is developed is highly relevant so openness and development is very important for intraoperability standards the second area is openness and implementation so one aspect of this would be having a standard that is published that we can see because that's not a given there are some I'll call them specifications that are actually proprietary that you can't see or certain aspects of the specification that you can't see so that's not an open standard but if there's a document that I can see so if we were all starting a company today and we wanted to develop a new product we could take the standard and run with it and develop a new product have to be able to view the standard another aspect of that has to do with the intellectual property restrictions that may or may not occur I think that an open standard should give preference to royalty free aspects of standardization when possible this is not always possible but at least having it available on our reasonable and non-discriminatory in a reasonable and non-discriminatory manner is comfortable openness and implementation and openness and use is the other aspect of that and that has to do with the effects of standardization if there are multiple competing products based on the standard then that would be an example of openness and use of recommendation is to just have an actual definition of open standards another recommendation has to do with again again this is a little bit high level but having principles or guiding principles for the interoperability framework itself and I noticed that this is a common feature in the various what we call gifts government interoperability frameworks so in the paper I lay out eight that I would recommend and fully that there will be different priorities in different countries but just to give examples of the different principles I won't go into the details of all of them here but the eight that are recommended in this particular paper have to do with accessibility interoperability information diversity which is important because this can't just apply to text based ICTs increasingly we need multimedia to be included in so information diversity I think is a very important one privacy, security market efficiency openness and transparency so those are the ones that I recommend so there's the whole issue of putting principles into the document that can be guiding principles they're really very normative in nature a third recommendation actually a whole other set of recommendations has to do with this question of how you translate guidelines into actual practice so this is divided into several different areas this requires a certain amount of political resolve it requires an operational understanding of how to actually implement the strategy through product procurement and it also requires some kind of ongoing method of compliance within these interoperability framework guidelines so I'll say a few recommendations about this creating political will how do you create the political will in studying the various approaches to this it seems that it really in many cases is part of an overall strategy including an overall innovation policy so fitting it within a country's innovation policy it also sometimes comes into play in open government directives initiatives to make government data more open so there's a direct linkage there but the basic idea is that the overall strategy contains different approaches to innovation policy as well as the functioning of government and so the gift would fit into there in terms of creating the political will though it seems like a lot of the frameworks emanate from high level executive branches of government but the actual task of doing the of developing it falls into some kind, it's usually spearheaded by a lead agency and in some cases this actual development also is in conjunction with some kind of a working group that is more multi-stakeholder in nature that incorporates industry participation as well as the participation of civil society so executive level, political will but also multi-stakeholder buy-in and collaboration and the development of the actual framework I also have a recommendation that this has to do with how do you translate it into practice if you don't have a list of actual standards how would someone in say a procurement office often a remote location how would they know which standards actually are open standards and it would take a lot of research so I think for it to be maximally useful there really should be that list of specifications now what probably shouldn't mean that the framework is a list of products I don't think it's really a very good idea to list products why is that keeping that list up to date would be very very difficult considering the rapid pace of innovation and what it also would do is it would preclude the ability of individual departments to make decisions based on agency specific requirements so what I recommend is having a list of standards that meet these criteria of openness but not having a list of products that adhere to those standards then just a couple of final points about compliance and I think this is one of the areas that probably will become a little clearer over the next few years and I'd love to when we get to the discussion part in just a few moments hear ideas about the whole compliance issue because we really have to grapple with this issue of ensuring operational compliance with the interoperability frameworks otherwise it's completely meaningless if you can't you can tell when I'm exaggerating that it's not completely meaningless but you have to translate it somehow into actual practice so some of these the compliance mechanisms can be done even prior to implementation of the framework and some can be done after the framework is initiated so what are some of the things that can be done beforehand these ideas came directly out of the UNDP meeting that I participated in recently so some ideas that were suggested one has to do with during actual government RFP processes requests for proposals where vendors could be required to certify in their proposals that their products meet different interoperability standards requirements so that's one idea area is enlisting enlisting actual agencies in the development of the framework and of course educating agencies about what the actual requirements are but not only the requirements but the importance of the frameworks so education about why this is a very important issue of governance a third idea prior to implementation is disseminating the technical reference model so this has to do with education it's stating the obvious but getting list of standards disseminating it into the appropriate procurement channels is very important then another idea before the actual implementation has to do with SLAs or service level agreements so requesting service level agreements when contracting with vendors and even considering someone suggested considering the service level agreements between agencies so that there's a certain level of compliance that is expected in interchange even among agencies so I thought that was kind of an interesting area how that would actually work remains to be seen interagency SLAs an interesting idea but once the implementation framework becomes operational there are other things that can be done for compliance so a few ideas there budgetary approval is always a mechanism so the idea of linking budgetary approval to the ability of agencies to demonstrate compliance is one idea another one country actually provides incentives to and I think they're actually bonuses to public service employees whose work is compliant with the government interoperability framework so that's an idea that I had never heard before prior to the UNDP the idea is to form a pure working group of CIOs or CIO level people from various agencies in partnership perhaps with industry and civil society to evaluate the compliance in various agencies so that's another idea these are just some ideas after implementation I'd love to hear about more but at an absolute minimum I think that interoperability compliance really should be applied at least through voluntary self assessments among various agencies and through requirements in the RFP processes and these are the actual procurement processes requesting that vendors certify that their proposals and the technologies of their developing their proposals complies with the e-gift specifications so these are a few ideas I do want to leave one final closing thought to again just to emphasize that government procurement policies that are based on open standards are the exact opposite of a proprietary standards mandate because one of them the proprietary standards mandate compels a citizen to use a certain product whereas if all goes well with an open standards approach there will be multiple competing products so that there's citizen choice as well as the free markets and economic competition and I also want to find out that of all that the entire spectrum of government standards involvement the procurement issue is really the least interventionist of all possible roles for governments because they do not mandate that private industry adopt any particular standards and they do not intervene directly in the standard setting process so there's a great lever to be used to promote openness through government procurement but it actually doesn't directly intervene in the standard settlement process and it doesn't provide a mandate that private industry do anything and what they choose to adopt so that's actually a very high level summary of the recommendations in the paper and I very much look forward to opening it up to discussion now thank you for listening thank you very much