Candy Strategies Inc.www.candystrategies.com

The Web’s Three Os:Open Standards, Open Source, Open

DataWhat do Records & Information Managers Need to

Know?

ARMA NCR - IM DaysOttawa – November 2012

Cheryl McKinnonCheryl@CandyStrategies.com

@CherylMcKinnon

• Cheryl McKinnon - President of Candy Strategies Inc.

• 17+ years in the content/information management industry

• Senior management roles with AIIM, Nuxeo, OpenText, Hummingbird

• Co-author of new AIIM ECM Master Courses (now offered here in Ottawa)

• Volunteer director with OSACAN.org (Open Source Alliance of Canada

Introduction

• What a Difference a Year Has Made

• Overview of Definitions

• Importance of Open Standards for Information Management

• Rise of Open Source in Information Management

• Momentum of the Open Data Movement

Agenda

• Survey of open source, open standards and open data adoption in Canada – big progress since last year

• Public Sector institutions in UK and US have many valuable lessons and research to share

What a Difference a Year Has Made

The Web’s Three Os:

Open Standards

Open Source

Open Data

• Not controlled by any single hardware or software vendor, often developed by consensus

• Royalty-free to use

• Often created or managed by an independent standards body or foundation

What are Open Standards?

• What makes a good open standard?

• Supported by vendors and end-users alike

• Made transparently

• Be openly available

• Have a clear governance process

• Be relevant to market needs and drivers

What are Open Standards?

• Roots back to the 1980s in the Free Software Foundation

• Practices rooted in the 1960s/70s – early research that evolved into the internet – open, participatory software development

• Modern definition emerges in 1998 when web browser Netscape Navigator (now Mozilla Foundation) released as open source

What is Open Source?

• Open Source Initiative Founded in 1998

• Developed consistent terminology, sanctioned software license agreements, practices and definitions

• 10 Key characteristics including: free distribution, availability of source code, accommodates derived works, no discrimination against people, groups or use

• http://opensource.org

What is Open Source?

• Simply? A way that a software developer licenses and distributes its source code

• Variety of license types with wide acceptance in courts and the software market

• Examples: GPL, Apache, MIT, Eclipse, LGPL

• Different licenses support different goals, development models, re-use of source code

What is Open Source?

• Open Knowledge Foundation definition: “A piece of data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike”

• Government open data initiatives became high profile in 2004 with the OECD declaration on open access to publicly-funded data

• 2009-2011: More than 200 governments at all levels initiate open data projects and online portals

What is Open Data?

The Web’s Three Os:

Open Standards

Open Source

Open Data

• Interoperability

• Portability

• Digital Preservation

Value of Open Standards

• Document/Content Management Systems

• “Content Management Interoperability Services” (CMIS) as an OASIS technical committee

• 1.0 Ratified in May 2010

• 1.1 - public review phase in August

• Retention Management now added to scope of standard

Value of Open Standards

• Statement of Purpose

• Define a domain model that can be used by applications to work with one or more Content Management systems

• Data Model, Abstract Capabilities, Set of Bindings

• Problem of “islands of incompatible systems” making it difficult for organizations and application developers to integrate content across and among systems

CMIS: Why and What is it?

IBM/FilenetIBM/Filenet NuxeoNuxeoEMC/EMC/

DocumentuDocumentumm

SharepointSharepoint AlfrescoAlfresco ……

CMIS Client: Portal, Scan/Capture, Content and

Business ApplicationsDocuments

Folders

Metadata

Checkin, Checkout

Versions

CRUD operations

Query : CMISQL

Renditions

Filing

Relations

REST (AtomPub) or SOAP

ACL

CMIS 1.1 – Updates Proposed

Holds Retention

• Dublin Core

• Metadata foundation behind many content management and library systems

• Core elements to describe digital items

• Enables better search, transfer, migration

Open Standards Support Portability

• Content becomes portable by tapping into common ground across diverse content management systems

• Technical Use Cases

• Federated Repositories

• Repository to Repository

• Application to Repository

Harvesting the Content Silos(Don’t Smash Them…)

• Long way to go but: PDF/A and ODF (Open Document Format) are starting points

• PDF/A an ISO Standard, ODF now an OASIS technical standard for office applications

• Goal to remove hardware and operating systems dependencies from viewing, consuming content

• Avoid locked-in dependence on any one vendor in precarious world of corporate mergers & acquisitions

Open Standards for Digital Preservation

• US Government committed to sustainable and readable formats for long term digital preservation

• 2012 Directive on Records Management

• UK Government committed to open standards with November 2012 Cabinet announcement

Open Standards in Government

• Accessibility – Ensure web resources can be read and used by broadest possible range of residents and businesses

• W3C open standards for web

• HTML5 – avoids lock-in of app-specific access

• Support for rich media

Open Standards in Government

The Web’s Three Os:

Open Standards

Open Source

Open Data

Yes.

Is Open Source Safe to Use?

• Concerns about “security” for open source in government have been laid to rest.

• US Department of Defense – 2011 “Lessons Learned” identifies open source as superior for reducing duplicate development efforts and by having larger pool of experts to fix bugs faster

• UK Cabinet Statement - 2011 – “dispels myths” and finds no difference in risk compared to traditional systems.

Is Open Source Safe to Use?

• What if we need support to fix an issue or do customization?

• Strong communities: Popular platforms have 1000s of developers

• Vendor backed support companies: Corporations to sell full-service support and maintenance packages

• Local experts: Access to code and distributed development processes ensures expertise can flourish anywhere

• Strong foundations: often heavily supported by large software vendors who develop and contribute code but don’t control overall governance

Is Open Source Safe to Use?

• What about the licensing?

• Several widely accepted, well-understood, court-tested licenses recognized by the OSI - opensource.org

• May be very permissive or very restrictive – with many shades in between

• Choose technologies with licenses that meets your use cases – to build commercial software? Or for an internal application?

Is Open Source Safe to Use?

• Organizations of all sizes and budgets can at last adopt information management tools

• The web provides opportunities for teams across departments, branches, other levels of government or private sector to collaborate on joint requirements

• Information/content management tools no longer available exclusively to those organizations with large IM/IT budgets – all can adopt solutions

Benefits of Open Source Adoption

• Cost models will be different than traditional software license models

• Total Cost of Ownership considerations should look at all factors

• UK Government TCO Open Source Toolkit – Calculation Spreadsheet

• Balance zero license cost with apples-to-apples needs for maintenance, support or developers

Make Informed Decisions on Open Source Adoption

The Web’s Three Os:

Open Standards

Open Source

Open Data

• Available and accessible

• Reusable and can be redistributed

• Permits universal participation

• These characteristics encourage interoperability with other data sets or applications

Characteristics of Open Data

• Ensure privacy and confidentiality restrictions are respected

• Release of data in useless, closed, or proprietary formats

• Example: large complex tables in PDF rather than .ods or .csv

• Inconsistent vocabulary, taxonomy and metadata used to describe data sets

• Within a large department as well as across agencies or other levels of government

Open Data Challenges and Risks

• Data.gc.ca – over 272,000 data sets

• 2013 commitment to use an open source portal designed for open data purposes

• Technology co-developed by US, India, other governments

Open Data in Canadian Public Sector

• City governments

• Ottawa a leader among local governments in Canada

• Provincial governments

• Ontario commits in fall 2012

Open Data in Canadian Public Sector

Why the Web’s Three Os Matter

Digital = 21st Century Knowledge Economy

• Organizations can start an information management project – faster and cheaper: Start testing, prototyping without significant financial investment

• Access to open data and open source tools spurs the app-economy

• Europe 2012 study – economic benefit of open source valued at $450 Billion ($114B in savings and $342 increased productivity)

• Useful new services, products, insights can be created with these new raw materials

Creating the Digital Goods and Services

• Organizations can take back control of their information and content management roadmaps

• Access to code, marketplaces, module exchange with peers, partners or supply chain

• Example: Drupal WxT project initiated to meet Canadian Federal web needs for bilingualism and accessibility - now adopted by other institutions and municipal governments

Improving the Digital Goods

• Line of Business and content management applications carry business content

• Goods and Services are bought, sold and contracted electronically

• Interoperable systems (ERP, WCM, BPM and Workflow, ECM) need to let electronic content move across business processes

• Reluctance to adopt basic Document Management interoperability standards is a repeat of the Rail Gauge Debates of the 1800s

Transporting the Digital Goods

• Digital Preservation has been neglected by the records and information management communities – vendors and practitioners

• Format decay, hardware obsolescence, loss or deletion of source code

• Cannot count on vendors to take care of your digital history, legacy and corporate memory.• Example: Microsoft can’t find the source code or

people to rebuild PowerPoint file specifications.

Protecting the Digital Goods

• UK Government • 2010 Cabinet Office Memo on Open Source• 2011 Open Source Procurement Toolkit • 2012 Open Standards Principles Memo• ICT Advice Note – Procurement of Open Source

• US Government• 2009 Memo from DoD CIO on Open Source• 2011 Lessons Learned Report- DoD• 2012 Records Management Directive• 2012 Contracting Guidance to Support Modular IT

Development• Military Policy on Open Source – Resource site

• France• 2012 Memo on Open Source

Canada Is Lagging on Adoption, But Made Progress in 2012

From Information Overload to Dark Ages 2.0?

http://opensource.com/life/10/10/information-overload-dark-ages-20

Candy Strategies Inc.www.candystrategies.

com

Thank You!Questions?

ARMA NCR - IM DaysOttawa – November 2012

Cheryl McKinnonCheryl@CandyStrategies.

com@CherylMcKinnon