With a little persistence, I have persuaded the UK Prime Minister’s Office to accept an e-Petition:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to adopt the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation.

If you are a British citizen or resident, please consider supporting this petition by voting online before 6th July.

In practical terms, the Hague Declaration is a call to governments to:

1. Procure only information technology that implements free and open standards;
2. Deliver e-government services based exclusively on free and open standards;
3. Use only free and open digital standards in their own activities.

The Declaration recognizes the crucial role that digital standards play in guaranteeing human rights such as freedom of speech and freedom of association, as these rights are increasingly expressed in the virtual, rather than the real, world. Examples of digital standards are Hyper Text Markup language (HTML) for web pages and Open Document Format (ODF) for office documents.

Free and Open Source software like Firefox and OpenOffice.org then use these standards to build the software that people need to take part in the virtual world, regardless of their language or financial circumstances. Free software built on free standards – a roadmap to end the digital divide.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.