Most European patients are still experiencing the healthcare of yesterday in which the patient was patient, the doctor knew best and the technology was outdated. But the attitudes and drivers needed to push us into a new healthcare experience are coming fast. The leader of the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, has called this
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Recently, Google posted a much publicised memo called the Meaning of Open in which Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management attempted to define Open. Attempting to define ‘Open’ is a complex task with many contradictions, and it is good that Jonathan has attempted this.
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ICT in general is both a heavy user of energy, and can be a tool to make more efficient use of energy possible. ICT and Energy in this respect are somewhat like symbiotic twins, both need the other to thrive, especially in a perspective of increased demand for energy, depletion of fossil fuel reserves and especially climate change.

In order to meet our goals of increasing the amount of sustainable energy and increasing energy efficiency, a transformation towards smart grids, including smart meters, is essential. It makes information on energy consumption available to the user in real time, which allows him to adapt his consumption patterns. Besides this, smart grids make large scale infusion of sustainable energy from various local renewable sources into the grids possible.

This transformation will necessitate smart investments in new technologies and changes in the value chain. Investments that will likely only render a sufficient return if they are monopolized and the costs for users are increased, or when there are sufficient possibilities of value added services. Value added services in particular could open up possibilities for new services and better deals for consumers and businesses. Consider for instance how domotica-services or the uptake of electric cars can be expanded in combination with smart metering systems.

In order for a broad array of services to be offered standardization is critical. It is up to the Energy and ICT industries to come up with these standards. And soon. In March of this year the European Commission mandated CEN/CENELEC and ETSI to come up with a standard for smart meters. It goes without saying that this standard should be open, needs to be as secure as possible, and sufficiently protect the privacy of consumers. We need to hurry because quite a large number of countries are already, or will soon be, investing in smart metering systems. Open standards for other parts of the smart grids infrastructure need to follow as soon as possible, but given the early stages of development, may need some more research.

Apart from the smart grids systems, it goes (almost) without saying that the ICT industry should lead by example and continue to develop ever more energy efficient applications, hardware and software. If needed regulation could help these developments along. Regulation in fact also needs open standards, although of a different kind. Standard methods for measuring and monitoring energy efficiency are needed in order to make claims of efficiency transparent.

The Internet has completed it’s 40th anniversary this fall– But how will the next 40 years look like? And by extension, which factors will influence the next 40 years of evolution of the Internet?
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Early nominations for the Mashable Open Web awards are in and the 500 nominees make fascinating reading.

Apart from the nominees themselves, it is interesting to see the categories for the choice of ‘Open Web’. By referring to ‘Open’ in context of the Web, one would expect to see a W3C standards  based discussion but ‘Open Web’ is a vague term which suits well for getting nominations, as the list clearly illustrates.
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Along with Open source and Open standards, we now have a new phrase; i.e. Open Government.

What does Open Government imply for standards?

Let’s take a step back. Prior to 1999, I used to work for an ERP vendor. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a complex class of software that is typically intended to manage all the functions of a company (such as Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Billing and so on). Inspite of their complexity, there was a mad scramble to install ERP systems which was mainly motivated by the Y2K deadline.

However, did ERP really make a difference in terms of innovation?

Not really.

ERP was all about internal functions of an organization, the ‘plumbing’ so to speak. It made very little difference to the customers as to what billing system a company used or what General Ledger the company used.

Last week, the White House adopted Drupal, the Open source content management system which has a strap line of ‘community plumbing’. Whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal. However, like ERP, if it is used only for internal functions (aka ‘plumbing’) – it should make no difference to anyone at all…

After all, Whitehouse.gov is a pretty structured website in terms of its content; photos of the President, videos, some blogs, information on legislation etc. And that content is mostly structured (apart from comments). One could argue that Drupal has many extensible libraries that third parties can build. But so do many other platforms.

Thus, the adoption of Drupal should be viewed more as a symbolic gesture for the use of Open Source; and in that role lies its greater significance and implications for standards.

Tim O’Reilly discusses the wider impact of the Drupal announcement under the concept of Gov 2.0.

The introduction of the terms Open Government/ Gov 2.0/ ‘Web 2.0 for Government’ adds to two already complex terms i.e. ‘Open Source’ and ‘Open Standards’. As viewed by Tim O’Reilly, Open Government is the concept of ‘Government as a platform’ which could also be seen as ‘Web 2.0 for Government’.

Web 2.0 itself is a philosophy i.e. a broad concept based on the foundation of Data, which many people wrongly equated to specific technologies (like the AJAX programming language).

Similarly, Open source (the technological foundation) is not necessarily needed for Open Government (which could be viewed as the concept/philosophical foundation of ‘Government as a platform’).

The question of whether Governments should mandate specific standards or technologies is more complex. Today, in the minds of most people we have a benevolent administration in the White House. But administrations can change every five years, and often they do. And consequently, enthusiasm for Government led ideas can wane.

The philosophy of Openness is correct, as is the idea of ‘Government as a platform’. However, just like Web 2.0, its technological implementation may be varied.

The standards for Open Government may be independent of the technology that is used to implement its internal systems as long as the philosophy of Openness and the idea of the ‘Government as a platform’ is maintained.

Smart Grid  technology can enable substantial savings of energy, decrease cost and increase reliability.  ZigBee Alliance technology currently has a momentum and is being selected as the interoperability standard on several continents.  
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In a previous post about the future of standards, – I mentioned that standards are boring but a necessary part of ICT strategy. Having said that, the future of standards is an interesting space – especially due to the management of the standards setting process involved ex. the complexity on a global scale
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The openEHR Foundation is an international non-profit foundation founded in 2000, with the ambition to make interoperable and lifelong electronic health records (EHR) a reality and improve medical care in the information society through the open standard specification openEHR.
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Background:

This blog is a summary of my discussion at the talkstandards forum last week in Brussels. I see both the talk and the event as the continuation of a debate – both online and offline.
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