This week, I spent two days on the wonderful Gotland island in Sweden at the Visby Agenda, a conference on Europe's future IT policy. Well spent, it turns out, since the Visby Declaration, i.e., the Swedish Presidency's conference conclusions, strongly support openness:
"10. EU member states and community institutions should seek to make data freely accessible in open machine-readable formats, for the benefit of entrepreneurship, research and transparency.""12. Open platforms for innovation and the development of services for public and commercial use should be fostered. This should include commercially neutral promotion of open solutions in public procurement to ensure that interoperability rests on a non-proprietary basis. In this context, standardised interfaces between process steps are one key element."
