Document Freedom Day (DFD) 31st March 2010

March 10, 2010

By MasPoster

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It is a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.

The most common document formats today are Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats. If a user received a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document, the user can go to Microsoft website and download Word Viewer, Excel Viewer or PowerPoint Viewer free of charge to open, view, and print the document, but the user will not be able to edit the document, unless the user purchase a copy of the software.

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However, for a Mac user or a Linux user or other non-Windows users, there is no free Word Viewer or Excel Viewer available, in fact, there is no Viewers for operating systems other then Microsoft Windows period.

If the document is a government forms, any citizens wish to access the electronic document are forced to buy and use Microsoft Windows just to view the document. What if Microsoft decides to stop offering the free Word Viewer and Excel Viewer? If editing is needed, again purchasing Microsoft Office is a must. The government is in fact is intentionally or unintentionally forced their citizens to buy Microsoft products.

How about businesses? It might seem natural that commercial companies pay for their Office Productivity software because it is a tool for them conduct businesses.

What if Microsoft decides to raise the price of their essential Word and Excel programs? What if Microsoft go bankrupt or disappear all together tomorrow (famous reputable big companies do go bankrupt and disappear, remember Pam Am and Lehman Brothers)? Would the secrets of the formats disappear too?

The Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats are almost the de facto document standards at the moment. However, these standards are made by, supplied by and ruled by one company. If this one company decides to change its standards or if anything happens to this one company, would we still be able to read our documents 10, 20, 50 years from now?

That is why we need Free Document Formats and Open Standards. When formats of documents are standardized in an open formats, any software maker can learn those details and make an application that can open, read, print and edit those documents. The software application can be commercial or non-commercial. Users have the power to choose what their need. And because the formats are open, people are able to create software for the formats even 100 years from now.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is to promote the use of Free Document Formats and Open Standards.

Complementary to Software Freedom Day, DFD aims to have local teams all over the world organize events on the last Wednesday of March. This is the third year that Document Freedom Day, the first year was on 26th March 2008. The DFD organizer is again looking for people around the world to join their effort this year.

DFD's main goals are:

promotion and adoption of free document formats
forming a global network
coordination of activities that happen on last Wednesday of March, Document Freedom Day

Once a year, DFD organizer will celebrate Document Freedom Day as a global community. Between those days, DFD organizer will be focused on facilitating community action and building awareness for issues of Document Freedom and Open Standards. DFD organizer hopes that more people will join the DFD community.

Who's behind DFD?

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is organized with help of many different players. It is a community effort that DFD organizer put together every year.

All of them will help DFD organizer to get the word out on DFD 2010, be it by publishing articles about Open Standards, publicizing the campaign, writing posts for the DFD blog, or simply helping DFD by putting the campaign icon on their websites.

Document Freedom Day's success is also based on the commitment of teams of volunteers worldwide.

There are many ways to take part on this campaign:

Put a banner in your websites, linking to DFD website. There are artworks and banners available in DFD Artwork2010 page.
Publish a blog post on Document Freedom Day, or Open Standards, and spread the word about the campaign. Send DFD a link, and they will include it in the DFD website.
Use microblog to spread DFD news and articles. Tag them using !dfd or #dfd2010
Organize an activity in your city on March 31st. For ideas on activities, check the Document Freedom Day website.
Donate money to DFD.
Become a partner organization. Contact Campaign Team on how to do that.

The Document Freedom Day web site is currently hosted by Free Software Foundation Europe.

Open Standards and Open Documents?

Open Standards allow people to share all kinds of data freely and with perfect fidelity. They prevent lock-in and other artificial barriers to interoperability, and promote choice between vendors and technology solutions. There are many legal definitions and/or interpretation of the term Open Standards in different organizations and countries. The basic ideas is that with Open Standards, users are able to:

choose any operating system or application and still be able to read and edit all old documents.
collaborate with others regardless of which software they are using.
use any software of choice to interact with your government.

Open Standards can lead to:

more competition in software, resulting in better pricing and service
increased competition in hardware, meaning more innovative and cost-effective solutions
lower taxes as a result of more effective governmental IT solutions that avoid the cost of lock-in

OpenDocument Format (ODF)

As documents and services are increasingly transformed from paper to electronic form, there is a growing problem that governments and their constituents and businesses may not be able to access, retrieve and use critical records, information and documents in the future. To enable the public and private sectors to have greater control over and direct management of their own records, information and documents, OpenDocument Format (ODF) is being promoted to be the primary document format for governments and businesses.

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (also known as OpenDocument or ODF) is an XML-based file format for representing electronic documents such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. While the specifications were originally developed by Sun Microsystems, the standard was developed by the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC - OASIS ODF TC, committee of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium and based on the XML format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite. In addition to being an OASIS standard, it is published (in one of its version 1.0 manifestations) as an ISO/IEC international standard, ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0.