Senator Barack Obama and the Democractic National Convention Committee,

In his campaign speeches, Senator Obama often evokes images of citizen participation in the governmental process. He proclaims that his message of hope is built on the foundation of mutual respect, and the prospect of working together to return the government to the hands of the people.

"It is not altogether clear what Obama meant when he referred to ‘universally accessible formats’. “Actually, in a clear indication that Obama has a good future in politics, he didn’t actually name any specific proposals related to ODF. In fact, there’s no saying what, specifically, he meant,”

Senator Kate Lundy hosted a pre-2020 Summit event in Canberra last week to generate ideas on how open source technology, open standards and open access to information might transform the way government departments and the business world operate.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project in the process of building a free, Web-accessible, user-editable map of the world. So far, most of its map data has come through user-contributed GPS traces, but OSM has recently undertaken the bulk import of government-collected data covering the entire United States.

A new programme promises to provide CRM users with large amounts of company contact data at no charge. Stuart Lauchlan examines Jigsaw's Open Data Initiative and asks whether it will change the course of the data industry.

Government, state and regional agencies, authorities and services may also publish in other formats, but they must always publish in one of these formats. The decree is retroactive, and by 2014 all documents published prior to this decree must have been converted and made available in one of the three formats.

Open source might get a better look-in within government, says Senator Kate Lundy, if those responsible for purchasing decisions were forced by policy to evaluate all the options on the market.

Proprietary record formats will increase the difficulty of preserving our culture, on top of the problems with obsolete hardware interfaces and the decay of storage media we think of as permanent. File data formats that are not published standards are just asking for trouble for long term data storage.

"Freebase, a cutting-edge service that could turn out to be a milestone in semantic web technologies, is now in “public alpha”... [...] Freebase gatheres its data from open accessible data sources such as wikipedia and does an obviously highly sophisticated semantic analysis on it, which means this database/searchengine “knows” the data it handles..."