1. Open Standards: Why the grassroots should care

• • Michelle Murrain

• MetaCentric Technology Advising

• Nonprofit Open Source Initiative

2. Outline

What is an open standard?

Document file formats and standards

Data sharing standards

APIs and standards

So why does it matter?

Discussion

3. What is an open standard?

An open standard is a collaboratively determined and publicly available standard for technology

There are varied definitions for what an open standard is

Basic definition: developed by consensus, industry-wide, and voluntary

4. What is an open standard?

A definition that is closer to my heart is one by Bruce Perens:

• Open Standards are available for all to read and implement.

• They maximize End-User Choice

• Open Standards are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee.

• Open Standards and the organizations that administer them do not favor one implementor over another for any reason other than the technical standards compliance of a vendors implementation.

• Implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form.

• Open Standards may employ license terms that protect against subversion of the standard by embrace-and-extend tactics.

• From: http://perens.com/OpenStandards/

5. Open Standards Examples

This all seems esoteric, until we talk about the open standards we all depend on:

• Email formats

• HTML/CSS

• TCP/IP (the language of the internet)

• If we didn't have open standards, we'd have a hard time doing much of anything online.

6. Standards battles that might sound familiar

Betamax vs. VHS

Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD

(These are formats really, not exactly standards)

7. Document File Formats

There are many formats in which documents are stored.

They have changed over time

The most used are not open standards

Microsoft formats arenotopen standards (even though they have become de-facto standards)

8. Document Formats

DOC (Microsoft)proprietary

PDF (Portable Document Format)prop. -> standard

RTF (Rich text format)prop.

Word Perfectprop.

TXT (Plain text)standard (ASCII)

HTMLstandard

XMLstandard

9. More document formats

XLS, PPT (Microsoft Excel)

SYLK (Symbolic LinK MS spreadsheet format)

10. Example

Everyone uses .doc format for sharing files.

.doc format is not an open, publicized standard

All developers except Microsoft must reverse-engineer the format

Reverse-engineering does not always work.

11. Word Document rendered (incorrectly) in Open Office 12. New Dueling Standards

Open Document Format (ODF)

• ISO standard for all office document formats such as word processing, spreadsheets and presentations

• Used by Open Office

• Meets the definition of open standard

13. Dueling Standards, cont.

Office Open XML (OOXML)

• Promoted by MS, used in Office 2007

• Undergoing standards process

• There are arguments as to whether it is actually an open standard

14. So why is this important?

Documents are data!

The ability to buy software should not determine whether or not an organization has access to their data.

Open standards promotes innovation and software choice.

Open standards makes migration easy.

15. Data Sharing Standards

Data sharing standards are standard ways to define certain kinds of data, so that it is more easily shared

Financial data is a good example

These standards generally use XML, itself an open standard

Not much traction in the nonprofit sector

16. Data Sharing Examples

XBRL eXtensible Business Reporting Language XML based language for financial data. Used by FDIC and others

XRI/XDI eXtensible Resource Identifier

ASAE (association group) Constituent XML Standards

17. APIs and data sharing

What is an API?

• Application Programming Interface

• A way to get data out (or put data into) an application

What is an open API?

• Documented and freely accessible (to those for whom it is appropriate)

18. Where do open APIs and open Standards meet?

Open standard: all applications can speak the same language about the data they have

Open API: that data is freely accessible to those who need it sharing between applications, or between organizations

Holy grail doesn't exist yet.

19. Why does this all matter to me?

Your data is your destiny

• Data about donors and clients

• Data about organizational process and history

• Data on staff

20. Only open standards can guarantee that destiny

Open standards means that any application for a given purpose (word processing, database, what have you) can read and write your data faithfully

Open standards and open source software go hand in hand

21. Resources

Wikipedia article on Open Standards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standards

Open Source Initiative's take on open standards as it relates to open source software:http://opensource.org/osr/

Oasis ODF format 1.1:http://tinyurl.com/2hfg7h

NTEN Open API whitepaper:http://tinyurl.com/yrfsbo

This talk is available at:http://wiki.metacentric.org