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Wednesday, December 14, 2005
The state of tech and the tech of state 
| | John Palfrey to the Massachusetts State House's forum on the Open Document Format procurement question today: |
| | That job is not to choose between competing technology vendors, circa 2005, in a fast-changing marketplace. The elephant in the room is the struggle between Microsoft on the one hand and IBM and Sun on the other. But that struggle is not, and cannot be, the real story on open standards policy. It's essential to bear in mind the state's proper role vis-a-vis this marketplace -- a marketplace which may in fact establish, and re-establish, other open standards over time, all plausibly based off of the same concept of XML. Consider, for instance, the "web 2.0" version of this discussion and witness the dramatic changes in the syndicated technologies space -- with RSS, Atom, OPML, the MetaWeblog API, and their ilk over the past few years -- which, to all but a few visionaries, were unthinkable as possible "open document formats" a short while ago. The key is to ensure enough flexibility in the process so that those who know the technologies and the implications of any changes can help the state to adjust its approach on the fly as progress, inevitably, marches on -- and such that citizens, or users, are not the ones left behind in the long-run. |
| | ...the legislator needs to get to know the technology developer, and those who set technology standards, much more intimately if the state is going to play in this game. |
| | I was going to put "vs." rather than "and" in the headline, then thought better of it. |
Missing a lue
| | I'd not noticed the term "c-level" before yesterday. It refers to Chief (whatever) Officers. Some guys here in the press room just told me, "No, that's been around for years." |
Syndicating direction
| | In fact, I'll also be giving the closing keynote for the conference. If you have any suggestions for that, just syndicate those with a tag, such as, SyndicateQNA. Your posts will show up here, and in my aggregator. |
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