In partnership with The Open Document Fellowship, the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) has announced plans to host a workshop on open standards in government at their upcoming conference, SCALE 4x. The focus of this workshop will be on the use of OASIS OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF) and document accessibility standards in state and local government. The goal of this event is to foster a discussion about choice in software and open standards at all levels of California government. The workshop will be held on February 10, 2006 at the Los Angeles Airport Radisson and will lead into SCALE 4x, the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo.

Topics to be covered at this workshop include:
• Benefits of open standards versus their proprietary counterparts.
• Technical merits of OpenDocument and XML-based file formats.
• Avoiding vendor lock-in: The importance of choice in software for gorvenment organizations and their constituents.
• The security benefits of heterogeneous software environments.

Confirmed speakers include Gary Edwards (OpenOffice.org) and David Eisenberg (OpenDocument Fellowship). Additional details on the workshop line up will be announced in early January.

SCALE's workshop follows in the steps of similar discussions which have been taking place in Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts recently established ODF as as statewide standard. All agencies and contractors working with the state will be required to use this format. Massachusetts chose the ODF standard in order to guarantee citizens access to public records. The State Information Technology Division found that access to documents and records stored in proprietary formats, such as Microsoft's Office 2003 format, could be cut off as soon as the vendor choses to cease development of their product. Documents stored in formats based on open standards such as ODF do not have this problem. Users are not locked in or dependent on a single vendor in order to read their data, as any vendor can create software to read these documents without royalties or restrictions.