Hungary's public administrations will by default use open document standards for their electronic documents, as of April this year, the government ministers agreed on 23 December, and all public organisations are encouraged to move to open source office tools. Hungary's government also in December decided to cancel the funding of proprietary office suite licences for all schools.

We have reported extensively about the Venezuelan government’s support of open formats in the area of information technology. But it was only recently that the National Center of IT (CNTI) made it mandatory for the public sector to use open formats (ODT, ODS, ODP, ODG).

China subsidises adoption of GNU/Linux and AFP has published the report "cash-strapped Latvia mulls switching from Microsoft"

The US software giant has launched a new set of products aimed at standardising the provision of online services to citizens by public administrations. But while Microsoft says the move will help address the fragmentation of Internet services offered by local authorities, competitors argue it may pose a threat to the development of alternative software.

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.

Some people seem to think that using only Open Source software and Open Standards for data in Public Administration is, if not sufficient, a big part of realizing Open Government. Personally, I am not so sure, and I also wonder if many non-geek citizens are really ready for Open Data and Open Government. Here is a summary of a talk I just gave on this topic. What do you think?

As I already explained in another article file formats are extremely important: unless, at least in Public Administrations (PAs), only open file formats are used, serious amounts of public money can go to waste, important public digital documents may become unreadable and private citizens or businesses may be forced to useless expenses if they want to interact with PAs.

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.

A government committee recommends a change in German law to enable public administrations to make their software available as free and open source. The current law prohibits governments from being part of the development process in the free software community.