The European Parliament should give the example for the openness of its software solutions, says Giancarlo Vilella, Director General for DG ITEC, the EP’s IT department, speaking at the Document Freedom Day workshop organised on 25 March by the EP’s Greens and the European Free Alliance. “ICT is a strong tool for democracy”, the Director General says. “We aim to be the avant garde of political institutions.”
Key issues for DG ITEC are interoperability and making information available in open formats, said Vilella. The Director General announced that when procuring ICT solutions, the IT department will require solutions to use open formats and be interoperable. “This has to be guaranteed by the companies submitting proposals.”
Vilella added that without IT there would be no European Parliament. “IT is an actor and it can be a dark force, acting against openness.”
The Director General responded to a presentation of a report on the IT consequences of the EP’s ground rules on openness. The report was summarised by Carlo Piana, a lawyer experienced with free and open source, and one of the two authors of the study. According to Piana, their research does not conclude that it is compulsory for public administrations to use free software. However, using free software is the easiest way to achieve openness, to implement open standards and to avoid IT vendor lock-in. “Other types of software require more effort.”
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Public administrations must avoid being locked-in to the solutions of IT vendors, Piana said, “as technology influences the making of political decisions.” He recommends that public administrations should approach their IT architecture much like librarians and curators do, with longevity and public access in mind.
The study was supervised by Douwe Korff of the University of Oxford. At the workshop in Brussels, Korff warned that understanding information technology is increasingly important in the political process. For civil society in particular, the demand for openness clashes with proprietary systems. Prime factors will be the level of access, the kind of changes that are permitted and how much citizens can be involved in the process, he said.
It is the fifth consecutive year that the Greens/EFA organise a Document Freedom Day in the European Parliament. This year’s workshop was hosted by MEP Max Andersson.
More information:
Document Freedom Day workshop by the Greens/European Free Alliance
Ensuring utmost transparency - Free Software and Open Standards under the Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament (pdf)
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