Portugal's parliament adopted a law last Wednesday requiring the country's public administrations to use open standards, including for their electronic documents. Portugal's government organisations will now be required to implement open standards in all digital documents that they publish, exchange, and archive.

The Italian region Puglia will make the use of open source software and open standards mandatory for its public administrations. A law, adopted on 2 December by the regional administration, instructs regional and local public administrations to use open formats for the electronic disseminations of documents, and wherever possible use free and open source software.

Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system

Hungarian Parliament has made the use of open standards mandatory by law in the
intercommunication between public administration offices, public utility companies, citizens and
voluntarily joining private companies, conducted via the central governmental system.

Document Freedom Day is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Open Document Formats and Open Standards in general. Every year on the last wednesday in March, we celebrate his day.

Former open source evangelist at Sun, reported on his blog, on a presentation he had given at a conference in Latvia concerning the ODF. Speaking before him, a Latvian government official had made the announcement that, from now on, all government departments in Latvia must accept documents in ODF.

"At the first international workshop of users of the Open Document Format (ODF) in Berlin to which the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic had invited about 150 users and political observers, Brazil and India, in addition to German cities such as Munich, emerged as leading proponents of open standards in the office area.

The Hungarian government has announced that it will be modifying procurement rules to allow open source to be used in public sector organisations. Previously, procurement rules had apparently named vendors such as Microsoft and Novell.

The UK government has made a statement offering cautious and qualified support for the adoption of open standards for government documents, but warns that there is no such thing as a document storage panacea.