Doctor Daniel Mashao, the chief technology officer at Sita (the South African State Information Technology Agency), announced the launch of the government-wide free and open source programme at the GovTech conference on Thursday.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

As the representative for Norway in the recent OOXML ratification process, Steve Pepper has become an outspoken critic of the IEC/ISO process. Pepper is also a passionate advocate of XML, open standards and Topic Maps.

"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 New Zealand State Services Commission's (SSC) championing of open-source software in government helped its ICT (Information and Communications Technology) branch pick up an award in the government category of the inaugural New Zealand Open Source Awards, held in Wellington this month.

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard.

South Africa has filed an official appeal against the ISO's fast-track decision to approve Microsoft's OOXML format as an international standard.

The head of South Africa’s government open source working group, the chief technical officer of the State IT Agency (Sita) and The Shuttleworth Foundation, have laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from it website.

FOSS Meet@NITC is an annual event on Free and Open Source Software at NIT Calicut. This event brings together open source enthusiasts from all over india. The 2008 edition of the event is being planned and is scheduled to be held from March 21st to 23rd.

If you are interested in participating in the meet, you will have to register at this site. Speakers may register at this site and post details of talks, workshop or bofs that he/she would like to conduct. They may also post polls to know the audience better. Delegates can post comments and vote on polls. We hope that this way the event can be molded by the participants themselves in the spirit of a true community event. Please feel free to inform us about your queries, suggestions and complaints.