[Ecommerce] PlexNex: J Love's Special Sauce

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://fussnotes.typepad.com/plexnex/2006/10/j_loves_special.html

Sam Hiser




     J Love's Special Sauce

I attended the Harvard Berkman Center discussion on Friday with the
usual ODF suspects -- who it is always good to see...like following
Phish -- and with the addition this time of a whole host of interested
parties from the Consumer side from places like Norway, Denmark,
Belgium, Yale. You know, foreign places, where in most cases the
commitment to the concept of a universal, portable document format is
more palpable than in the pecuniary, milque-toast USA.

The conference was assembled with skill by CPTech together with the
TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). And it produced this
extraordinary entry by Jamie Love on Huffington Post: "When Standards
Are Political -- ODF"
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-love/when-standards-are-politi_b_32192.html>.
This is a high-water mark for speaking normal to the normal folks.

During the day full up with panel discussions, it was Jamie who
prostrated himself with the dumbest of dumb questions in order to bring
the conversation to a level that at least XML experts could understand.
I'm sorry to say we geeks didn't take the hint and continued for most of
the morning to ramble on quite beside the basic points that would orient
people who don't spend all day steeped in ODF. (I know Jamie knows ODF
better than his questions indicated, and his article proves it.) Only in
the afternoon did the ole policy veterans from the EU inject a bit of
sanity and common sense.

It was a long day, to be honest. But I still want more of these.

Why?

Why? Because the consumer groups and the highly intelligent and
well-networked people there are key to getting the ODF story out on
multiple fronts, on all of which we need to make our seven
impressions...and then, btw, deliver better software.

The best & brightest in that room including Jamie and Laura DeNardis (of
the Information Society Project at Yale Law School) are headed to
Athens, Greece, next month to the Internet Governance Forum which comes
under the auspices of the UN. There, at the IGF, there will be a
proposal for global norms to support open standards for key aspects of
info-tech -- including file formats.

Jamie intends to propose a sort of multi-national declaration of policy
intent toward a universal file format standard (like ODF). Wish him
luck, since we can use PR like that...as well as a few more policy
adoption cases. How about Argentina? Canada? UK schools? South Africa?
Singapore? Jeff -- how about another saki-bet?