Since spring, when we founded the Parlamentarische Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit (group of parliamentarians on digital sustainability), interest in this topic is rising. This and next month only I’m doing four speeches on these issues starting tomorrow in Vienna:

“Digitale Nachhaltigkeit: Zusammenhang zwischen Open Source Software, Offenen Standards und freiem Wissen” October 13th, 2009 at Fachtagung „InterOperabilität - vom Stand der Technik zu Zukunftsstrategien auf europäischer Ebene“ in Vienna, Austria

“Open Source 2010: Vision eines Lobbyisten” October 28th, 2009 at Puzzle Tech Talk, Bern, Switzerland

“Digitale Nachhaltigkeit: Auswirkungen für Business und Gesellschaft” November 12th, 2009 at World Usability Day, Technopark, Zürich, Switzerland

“Nachhaltige, innovative eGovernment-Lösungen basierend auf dem Open Source Community-Prinzip” November 17th, 2009 in Fachsession of eGovernment-Symposium 2009, Bern, Switzerland

Although I’ll focus a little bit for each presentation and adapt the slides, the key message stays the same as is has done in my previous speeches on this topic:

“Digitale Nachhaltigkeit in der Schweiz – ein Bericht zur Lage der Nation” September 23th, 2009 at OpenExpo, Switzerland (YouTube and PDF slides)

Participant of panel discussion “Proprietäre Software versus Opensource – Erfahrungen im Dokumenten Management” September 18th, 2009 at eGov Fokus “Dokumenten-Management und Langzeitarchivierung”, Kompetenzzentrum Public Management und E-Government, Berner Fachhochschule Wirtschaft und Verwaltung, Switzerland

“Netzzunft-Treffen: Politik 2.0 Teil 1 – Digitale Nachhaltigkeit” July 29th, 2009 at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (PDF slides)

Thinking about the passed and the planned presentations I realize that we’re indeed in the middle of the process of defining the term “Digitale Nachhaltigkeit” or digital sustainability. Just tonight I spoke with my ETH-PhD colleague Marcus Dapp (his blog) about his definition of “Digitale Nachhaltigkeit” - he doesn’t have one either despite teaching his lecture “Digitale Nachhaltigkeit in der Wissensgesellschaft” (lecture slides) for the fourth time - he promised me to change this soon ;)

This year I had the honor to do the keynote speech at OpenExpo, ‘my own event’ ;)

(Just for the record: I didn’t nominate myself, it was Hannes who asked me to speak and also he invented this bragging title!)

Digitale Nachhaltigkeit in der Schweiz – ein Bericht zur Lage der Nation
Die parlamentarische Gruppe Digitale Nachhaltigkeit fördert den nachhaltigen und innovativen Umgang mit Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien (ICT) und setzt sich ein für den öffentlichen Zugang zu Wissensgütern. Diese und andere Initiativen stellen sicher, dass in der Schweiz das Engagement für eine nachhaltige und offene IT gerade in der Rezession nicht blosses Lippenbekenntnis bleibt.

Yesterday I had to honour to talk to the illustrious Netzzunft group about my political lobbying activities related to our parlamentarian group of Digital Sustainability. Herer are the slides of the current status of our movement:

Today I studied a little bit Red Hat’s and Georgia Tech’s Open Source Software Potential Index. The nice map illustrates the international adoption of open source software (OSS) in the three different areas: government, industry, and community. As their scientific paper describes data was drawn from an enormously broad range of sources.

So I took the country rankings and ordered them by government adoption (which is interesting to me at the moment). As can be seen in the table (PDF, ODS, XLS), Switzerland falls back extremely far. While being 22nd in the overall ranking (which already is very bad considering being 7th in the ICT environment), the government’s OSS adoption is on rank 34. As can be seen in the data, there is only one lower rank, 45. Thus we’re basically second last in worldwide OSS adoption, a real developing country - one more reason to help our public administrators a little bit in their efforts procuring software in a way that enables OSS solutions as well…

As the Tagesanzeiger reported tonight we’re preparing an appeal at the federal administrative court against the recent 42-million-placing of the federal administration with Microsoft (official press release).

Unfortunately such a legal step is necessary because Swiss public administration is still not realizing its uncompetitive behavior as this new case in the Bernese administration shows: My canton is planning to spend 80 million CHF for its new IT infrastructure. They intend to procure the new software publicly - except for Windows and Office! I really don’t get it. Yesterday’s report in the NZZ online (printed newspaper today) again shows clearly the benefits of Solothurn’s successful open source strategy saving over 1 million CHF a year.

Update 2009-05-12: Broad media coverage of the announcement:
Tagesanzeiger/Der Bund/Basler Zeitung
NZZ online
Radio DRS
Golem.de
Netzwoche
Linux Community
inside-it.ch
Computerworld Schweiz
WinFuture.de
pro-linux

Update 2009-05-12: NZZ reports on same issue in SBB, Swiss IT media reacts:
NZZ on Microsoft at SBB without public procurement
inside-it.ch
iTReseller
InfoWeek

In today’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) there is a elaborated report on the questionable procurement of a 42 million CHF contract with Microsoft (publication in the Schweizerischen Handelsblatt SHAB).

Update 2009-05-05: Again various reactions, now also from mass media:
10vor10 (movie above, HD recording of 10vor10 report)
OSOR.eu - Open Source Observatory and Repository
Follow-up in the NZZ
Tagesanzeiger/Basler Zeitung/Berner Zeitung
heise.de
InfoWeek
inside-it.ch
Pro-Linux
iTReseller
gulli:news

Two years of lobbying for open source software in Swiss departmental and national politics finally reached a next milestone. This week the following six parliamentarians (Nationalräte) founded the cross-party parliamentarian group “Digital Sustainability” coordinated by the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open:

Walter Donzé (Nationalrat EVP Kt. Bern)
Edith Graf-Litscher (Nationalrätin SP Kt. Thurgau)
Kathy Riklin (Nationalrätin CVP Kt. Zürich)
Alec von Graffenried (Nationalrat Grüne Kt. Bern)
Christian Wasserfallen (Nationalrat FDP Kt. Bern)
Thomas Weibel (Nationalrat GLP Kt. Zürich)

Next to the legislative politicians also pioneers in public open source diffusion such as François Marthaler, member of the governing council of Vaud, as well as Kurt Bader from Solothurn attended the meeting.

We spent a nice dinner in the Café Fédéral after the first day of the Sondersession analyzing the previous political proposals and discussing various possibilities on how to continue:

It’s also great to notice that the topic of open source software becomes more and more diffused into media for government officials (see article on SGVW portal) and private persons (see article in the current issue of WOZ).

Update 2009-05-04: Nice reactions from the European ICT community on our today’s press releases in German and French:
heise.de
Linux Magazin
Open Source Observatory
Golem.de
inside.it
Computerworld
InfoWeek
iTReseller

The open source evangelization based on the content in the OSS Whitepaper continues with a presentation at the InfoSocietyDays in Bern in the E-Government Track…

…and with an article in the InfoWeek issue on open source software:

Today is a great day: the 2500 issues of our new open source image brochure were delivered - 300kg of dead trees…! The freshly designed 16p whitepaper with 13 statements of Swiss ICT celebrities can be downloaded for free or ordered for CHF 10.00 per copy from the /ch/open website. Now let’s assail policy makers with our open source software marketing campaign!

I have to admit: My favorite party is very old - already 90 years of Swiss politics must seem very dusty. However, looking at a new political science statistics website, the EVP is almost the oldest of the small middle parties and the most steady growing one since decades.

For me, the political career has just begun. I wrote my first political statement just last month - about family issues in the city of Bern and the new Familienbericht der Stadt Bern. Let’s see how the story goes on ;)