Open standards in Massachusetts
Beginning in 2003 Massachusetts became one of the first states specifically to address so-called open formats for its state government digital documents and address the importance of being able to read electronically stored public documents long after the application that created them was no longer supported or available. The effort was part of a wider effort by the state to standardize on an overall Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM), an effort that was also announced in 2003.
However the process by which the standardized format issue was addressed by a small group of state information-technology (IT) employees, working behind closed doors according to a 2006 legislative report23 and possibly with favored technology suppliers according to media reports, was found to be ill-advised if not illegal. The IT employees involved worked for Eric Kriss, the state's then Secretary for Administration and Finance, an appointee of then Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. The legislative committee involved—known as the Massachusetts Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight—was controlled by the majority Democratic Party.
The committee had actually begun investigating the ETRM in 2003 when it was first announced because Kriss said at the time that
"Effective immediately, we will adopt… a comprehensive Open Standards, Open Source policy for all future IT investments…."
The committee immediately expressed concerns about the cost of the ETRM effort and the new Open-Standards/Open-Source (OS/OS) policy but questioned what Kriss meant by "we." As part of the governor's office, Kriss arguably had no constitutional or legal authority to put his department in charge of public records (which are the responsibility of a separate Massachusetts constitutional officer) and clearly had no constitutional authority for legislative- and judicial-branch public records. The legislative committee also questioned the process by which the ETRM would be developed.
Various versions of the ETRM were released between 2003 and 2005 but they received very little publicity because of their technical nature and the fact that the involved IT employees had not tried to dictate procurement policies that crossed into other non-IT departments, departments under the authority of separate constitutional officers, or departments reporting to the legislature or judiciary. Specifically, none of the first few ETRMs mentioned document formats other than to say that they were an issue that should be addressed in a future ETRM. But following a proposed open format standards meeting (link previously included in this article but no longer available on mass.gov site) held by Kriss on June 9, 2005; the standardization issue boiled over into a battle about what the term "open standards" meant. On August 31, 2005, Kriss' department released a revised draft of the ETRM that explicitly endorsed the OASIS OpenDocument format developed by Sun (JAVA) Microsystems along with following three other "standard" formats: HTML, Adobe PDF, and TXT.
Specifically not listed were any standards associated with Microsoft Office document-production applications even though Microsoft was the leading supplier of such applications to the state. "Standard" is in quotes above because PDF was no more a "standard" at the time than Microsoft's Office formats. The August 2005 release of the ETRM noted that the new "standards" would not go into effect until January 2007. The effort to freeze Microsoft out of such procurements was possibly part of a multiple-year process that began in 2002 with a study24 by a state-sponsored group called the IT Commission. The IT Commission was "facilitated" by IBM (IBM) consulting employees under contract and included a Sun employee but no Microsoft employee. IBM uses ODF in one of its less popular Lotus products or at least did so at the time. Procedurally, it would seem logical that Microsoft should have been represented on the commission or all vendors should have been barred.
In addition to the relevant official state documentation on the subject noted below, there is contemporaneous reporting of the non-public dealings about ODF between Sun and state IT employees on ZDnet.25 One of the sentences about what appears to be a Sun-ODF effort to manipulate the definition of open standards was this information from David Berlind of ZDnet in October 2005:
"Although it isn't clear what Massachusetts' test for openness was back in the early 2005 timeframe, it is clear that "the test" was officially revised... by the time (the latest Massachusetts' Enterprise Technical Reference Model) ETRM was ratified on Sept. 23..."
Why the test was revised was answered in 2006 in a Post-Audit and Oversight Committee report titled "Open Standards, Closed Government". The information about a flawed process developed by Berlind was confirmed in the legislative report, which said that August 2005 version of the ETRM was put together by a "kitchen cabinet", which not only failed to give outsiders such as Microsoft a reasonable chance to comment on or react to its plans but also froze out all other relevant Massachusetts IT groups, including the ones involved with aiding the disabled and those in charge of public records.
The legislative report lays out how this small IT group called the Information Technology Division (ITD)—remember despite all the surrounding publicity about the open standards issue in Massachusetts, this IT group is actually one department in one part of one branch of the Massachusetts government—took numerous steps to try to manipulate the document-preparation application procurement process. The legislative committee concluded that the group was:
"… not aware of the cost of the ETRM, the impact it could have on the state's public records, limitations on IT accessibility for persons with disabilities, that the agency excluded key governmental and advocacy groups, and that the proposal was issued in violation of state law."
The above is the summary; the details involve dozens of findings and recommendations and almost 100 footnotes. In particular, in terms of access for the disabled, the committee found:
1. "ITD released the ETRM despite public testimony that the OpenDocument Format ("ODF"), an ITD approved open standard, may impair IT accessibility for thousands of workers with disabilities. ITD, the Massachusetts Office on Disability and advocates from the disability community testified that the ODF may not be compatible with assistive technology, such as screen readers and voice recognition software, required by persons with disabilities.
2. "After seven months of negotiations, the Information Technology Division still has not completed a Memorandum of Understanding between state agencies and the Massachusetts Office on Disability to ensure accessibility of IT applications.
3. "The Committee learned that the state has had a history of accessibility problems with IT applications, including the state's human services website and the state's main website, Mass.gov."
Today as in 2005 the issue of document format standards is, as it should be, a minuscule part of Massachusetts's ETRM (now in its fifth version26). The exclusive ODF bias supposed to have gone into effect in January 2007 was stopped by the legislative committee's actions. Kriss — most likely coincidentally — left his position in October 2005, only a month after releasing ETRM 3.5. New IT management in state government gave Microsoft a chance to make the "open standard" formats list (which it did when OOXML was accepted as a standard by the ECMA in 2006) and it gave Sun a chance to make ODF handicapped accessible (and thereby stay on the list).
Massachusetts ETRM currently considers HTML, ODF, OOXML, PDF, RTF and Text to be acceptable document formats for public documents. The issue of accessibility for the disabled is now a key part of the IT procurement process. The issue of constitutional authority was never specifically settled but given the breadth of acceptable "open standard" formats, the issue is apparently moot.
References
Microsoft: We were railroaded in Massachusetts on ODF