Proponents of open source software are a creative bunch. Their flexible, open and collaborative way of working has certainly led to innovation not only in software development but also in the way that we now view many aspects of public policy.

On the positive side, the understanding of open source principles and ways of working has motivated us all to be more transparent, more open to creative partnerships and to place a premium on innovation as a public good.
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The Obama Administration has made eHealth deployment a prioritized issue and through American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, approximately $ 19 billion was made available for spending in Healthcare IT infrastrucure.$ 17 billion were earmarked for incentive payments for the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs); this program is now starting to take shape.
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I have been invited to attend a conference called EuroCPR: Policies for a digital Europe: lessons learned and challenges. The agenda (pdf) has a session called Policy benchmarking and policy learning which I hope to attend. The basic idea of this session appears to be to learn from each other and to create conceptual and empirical Foundations of Cross-National Benchmarking of policy.
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Standardisation of ICT solutions is an essential enabler for climate change. Whether it is for infrastructures supported by ICT (buildings, energy networks, logistics…) or ICT infrastructure itself (fixed and mobile networks, data centres, PC’s…and the various applications running on these…), interoperability of ICT products and services enable energy reduction in two ways: firstly by avoiding (or at least reducing) the need for development of interfaces between systems, which themselves require hardware to run, consuming unnecessary energy;
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