The recent debate on the open data standards (between OXML, proposed by Microsoft and ODF from Sun and IBM) has generated many interesting response worldwide particularly from the ‘open source’ proponents. In the age of social protocols for information exchanges & service oriented architecture, this discussion seems more relevant than anything else. Typically in a debate regarding technical industry format, issues like market share, cost of innovation and interoperability take precedence. But rarely a discussion can be found where ‘how the user community is affected or how their work flow will be impacted’ with the change is constructively debated.

I found a very interesting comment posted by a reader in Venkatesh Hariharan’s (Head Open Source, Red Hat India) blog Open Source India that underlines the crux of the matter from an expert user’s point of view:

I sit on a variety of standards committees. I don’t really want to, I have other things I’d rather do with my time, but I am forced to. If I don’t some dimwit will try and get something adopted that is duplicative, single sourced, or downright idiotic. This happens a lot. … someone in the automotive industry decides to innovate, and designs a 14.5″ wheel and tire, and it’s installed on a new car. Now you’ve got a tire that can only be replaced from one vendor (because there’s a patent on that size of tire). The vendor charges 3 times the price of a 15″ tire, because it’s a VERY special tire, and your tire blows in a city where no one sells that tire. Pretty damned stupid, isn’t it? Wacko Electric designs and patents a new light bulb, that only fits Wacko sockets. The socket and bulb are sold to home builders at half the price of a standard socket, but the bulbs are sold to home owners at 5 times the price of a standard light bulb. Pretty damned stupid, isn’t it? And damn - guess what? My old computer backups are on 8″ floppy disks. No computer today comes with a floppy disk drive. If I have an old 8″ disk drive, no computer built today can run it. Maybe I got lucky, transfered from 8″ to 5.25″, then to 3.5″, and then to CD, and now to DVD, so the source is still available. My old programming codes won’t compile without a major re-write because the languages have changed. Oh, and Tweedle Dee Compiler Company innovated proprietary extensions into their product. Jerks.

So evidently the ‘Interoperability’ we talk about, sitting in the high powered steering committee of a standard regulatory apex body, isn’t the same in the common user parlance. It is something much more crucial. Continuous ‘data migration’ is time consuming, skill & resource intensive and most importantly it prevents the information, that happened to be encoded in a certain document format, to flow freely and feed into the collective intelligence for common good. Point to note here is that the document company may own the format but they have no right to control the freedom of information that they contain.

Additionally there are many forms of information exchange that do not fall into the category of ‘business to business’ or ‘business to consumer’, particularly in the case of government to citizen channels. Documents are the life blood of modern governments and their citizens. Governments use documents to capture knowledge, store critical information, coordinate activities, measure results, and communicate across departments and with businesses and citizens. Increasingly documents are moving from paper to electronic form. To adapt to ever-changing technology and business processes, governments need assurance that they can access, retrieve and use critical records freely and without bearing major cost overheads. This applies to citizens’ access to government documents as well. Especially with new and effective democratic tools such as RTI (Right to information), transparency between various processes, stakeholders and beneficiaries critically depends on the access to information at little or no cost.

Lastly the low income marginalized communities in the developing regions are very far away from this debate of document formats. Electronic documents and their fancy presentations in a desktop environment or sophisticated exchange protocols do not mean a thing to them. They couldn’t care less about what format the information is encoded in. Rather what has become increasingly clear through years of research is that people interact with technology in such a way that they do not distinguish separate acts of information gathering and communication. While to some extent this conflation is not necessarily confined to developing regions, it is particularly acute in areas where people live in significantly impoverished information environments. Communication as Information-Seeking: The Case for Mobile Social Software for Developing Regions. Kolko, Rose, Johnson. IW3C2, Technology for Developing Regions.
These communities do not have the necessary conditioning to respond to the information and communication artifacts in the way digital-haves do, but a majority of them, particularly the semi-urban communities, are habituated in a multi-channel, multi-platform information environment. They also learn quickly by observing and to some extent the effort to integrate with the larger system force them to adopt similar communication behavior. Yet they fail to make full utilization by accessing, living and acting upon these information primarily because of the inability to switch modes or formats of communication easily.
It is time the world gets out of the ‘document hang over’.