Late last month the First International ODF Users Workshop was held in Berlin. The event was attended by officials representing 20 governments from around the world. South Africa was represented by Aslam Raffee, the chief information officer at the department of science and technology.

A week before the workshop the South African government became the latest country in the world to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as a government standard for information exchange.

The workshop, which discussed moving from ODF policy to actual deployment, was hosted by the German Federal Foreign Office and the ODF Alliance. Countries attending the workshop included Brazil, India, Belgium, Netherlands and France.

Raffee, speaking at a session on ODF and interoperability, referred to the foreword of the newly-issued Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) v4.1, in which minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, South Africa's Minister for the Public Service and Administration, said: "To ensure the enhancement of interoperability across Government, a minimum set of standards are included in this document as a required Government-wide standard. To this end, this updated version of MIOS contains an explicit definition of open standards as well as the inclusion of the ISO (International Standards Organisation) OpenDocument Format."

Raffee says that of the countries attending the workshop Belgium and the Netherlands were the other countries that had adopted ODF as a national government standard. "Most of the others have a more de-centralised approach. The same can be said of the EU itself," he said.

He says that countries such as Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are all doing major migrations. "Belgium has adopted it as a standard and have a good migration plan. The German foreign office is migrating its 10 000 workstations across 300 international sites and are coming up with good lessons in language support. They already have done Arabic and Armenian," says Raffee.

Opening the two-day workshop German federal minister for foreign affairs, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said:

"Modern information technology has turned the world into a village with amazing speed. It links people and builds bridges in a way which even quite recently we would have believed impossible. An open, unhindered exchange of information in all areas of life is of fundamental importance for today's knowledge-based society. It is an important foundation for our shared objective: a peaceful, democratic, pluralistic society. The OpenDocument Format, as a completely open and ISO-standardised format, is an excellent vehicle for the free exchange of knowledge and information in the globalised age."

The OpenDocument Format Alliance is an organization of governments, academic institutions, non-government organisations and industry dedicated to educating policy makers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of ODF.