Policy & Internet

www.psocommons.org/policyandinternet

Vol. 2: Iss. 3, Article 6 (2010)

E-Governance Policies for

Interoperability and Open Standards
Laura DeNardis, Yale Law School

Abstract
Information and communication technology standards are increasingly intertwined
with functions that are paradigmatic responsibilities of governments. The degree of
openness in technical standards can have public policy implications in several areas:
a nation’s innovation and competition policy; the ability of governments to
efficiently and cost effectively perform services such as national security, disaster
response, and e-Health administration; and the ways in which standards serve as a
form of regulation making decisions such as the extent of user privacy on the
Internet. Because of these possible policy implications, governments have a vested
interest in promoting open technical standards adhering to principles of
transparency, cost efficiency, and interoperability.

This paper examines various possibilities for governments to engage with

information and communication technology standardization (e.g., development,
regulation, funding, adoption) and ultimately recommends that governments, as
significant parts of technology markets, can exert market influence, as well as
provide efficient e-Governance functions, through procurement policies that
promote open standards, often through electronic government interoperability
frameworks (e-GIFs) specifying information technology standards for e-Governance
infrastructures. These procurement policies are the least interventionist of possible
roles for governments in standardization because they do not mandate that private
industry adopt particular standards and do not intervene directly in the standards-
development process.

Drawing from roundtable discussions with government officials at the United

Nations Development Programme’s Global Meeting on Government Interoperability
Frameworks in Brazil, this paper surveys a number of existing government
interoperability frameworks (Brazil, the European Union, Japan, and South Africa)
and recommends best practices for these emerging e-Governance frameworks.

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Keywords: e-Governance, Internet governance, open government, interoperability,

open standards, Internet standards, e-GIFs

Author Notes: http://lauradenardis.org or [email protected]. The author is an

Internet governance scholar teaching at Yale, the Executive Director of the Yale
Information Society Project, and the author of Protocol Politics: The Globalization
of Internet Governance (The MIT Press: 2009). The author wishes to thank third-
year Yale Law School student Jacob Gardener for his research assistance with this
paper. This paper also benefitted from in-person interviews conducted at the United
Nations Development Programme’s Global Meeting on Government Interoperability
Frameworks 2010 held on May 4–6 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Recommended Citation:
DeNardis, Laura (2010) “E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open
Standards,” Policy & Internet: Vol. 2: Iss. 3, Article 6.
DOI: 10.2202/1944-2866.1060
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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

Introduction
Information and communication technology (ICT) standards are increasingly
intertwined with functions that are paradigmatic responsibilities of
governments. The linkages between standards and public policy exist in
several areas: a nation’s innovation and competition policy; the ability of
governments to efficiently and cost effectively perform services such as
national security, disaster response, and e-Health administration; and the
ways in which standards serve as a form of regulation making decisions such
as the extent of user privacy on the Internet. Open government initiatives to
engage direct citizen input into state administrative functions must also rely
upon open interoperability standards that provide citizens with access to
government via their choice of technological device.1 Information systems of
e-Governance can enhance the legitimacy of the administrative state and
profoundly increase the ability of governments to serve and interact with
citizens but only if these systems reflect principles of transparency, public
accountability, and openness.2
Apart from direct government functions and interactions with
citizens, the degree of openness in standards affects overall national
conditions relating to innovation policy and online freedom. Openly
available standards are central to national innovation policy and national
economic competitiveness because they provide a common platform from
which innovation can proceed and a level playing field on which
competition can occur. Standards similarly play a central role in either
enabling or impeding global trade. Furthermore, design decisions made
during the formation of standards can have direct public interest effects in
areas such as privacy, accessibility, and e-Health services.
Internet standards governance, particularly the development of
standards, has historically been done by standards institutions
overwhelmingly comprised of participants from private industry. Because of
the increasing importance of ICT standards both to e-Governance and more
broadly to society, governments are taking a greater interest in this area and

1
The design of information systems and, in particular, the underlying standards, are what
enable the participatory practices of what Beth Simone Noveck terms “doing
democracy.” “While these software innovations fulfill the basic statutory requirements,
they go beyond notice and comment to produce more deliberative, group-centered
participatory practice. These innovations embed theories of collective action into
software architecture and tie both to the legal mandate of citizen participation.” See
Noveck (2005, 2009).
2
See Citron (2008) on how open technical models can “invigorate the participatory
model of the administrative state.”

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developing national strategic approaches toward ICT standardization. Many

national strategies recognize the public importance of openness in standards.
This paper begins by describing the increasing linkages between
standards and governance. It then examines various possibilities for
governments to engage with ICT standardization (e.g., development,
regulation, funding, adoption) and ultimately recommends that governments,
as significant parts of technology markets, can exert market influence as well
as provide effective e-Governance through procurement policies that
promote open standards. One of a nation’s many procurement options is to
develop a government interoperability framework (GIF) specifying
information technology standards for e-Governance infrastructures. This
paper surveys a number of existing GIFs (South Africa, the European Union,
Brazil, and Japan) and makes recommendations for best practices for these
adoption frameworks, including a definition of standards that are open in
their development, open in their implementation, and open in their use. The
paper concludes with a discussion of how to translate interoperability
frameworks into actual practice.

Linking Standards and Governance in the Twenty-First

Century3
Information and communication standards are the specifications that provide
common data formats, software interfaces, and network characteristics that
enable interoperability among devices adhering to these standards,
regardless of manufacturer or geographical location. Adhering to common,
openly published standards enables heterogeneous technologies to exchange
information and allows users to be able to interchange one product for
another with the knowledge that they can still connect. Examples of such
open standards are the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol) specifications underlying the Internet, HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol) underlying Web communications, and Open Document Format
(ODF), a standard for document file formats. When a standard is openly
published and available to implement in new products, it can result in
multiple, competing products and rapid technological innovation. As Phil
Weiser describes, “The most formidable regulatory regime that has governed

3
This section is adapted from “Political and Economic Implications of Protocols: A
Framework,” a section of DeNardis (2009).

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

the Internet to date is the institution of open standards that has allowed the
Internet to grow exponentially as a network of networks” (Weiser 2001).
Standards are sometimes also political. Although existing at a
technical level invisible to most technology users, the design decisions
leading to standards can embed the values and reflect the interests of
standards developers.4 An underlying question of this paper is how standards
openness intersects with public policy. There are many definitions of “open
standards.”5 Questions about standards openness exist in several areas. The
first is the question of openness in a standard’s development, meaning who
is permitted to participate in standards design or permitted to access
information about the development of a standard and associated
deliberations, minutes, and records. A second set of questions addresses the
degree of a standard’s openness in its implementation, meaning whether the
standard itself is published, whether the standard can be accessed for free or
for a fee, and to what extent the standard has underlying intellectual property
restrictions for implementing the standard in products. A third set of
questions addresses the openness in a standard’s use, meaning the resulting
extent of product competition and user choice of technologies based on the
standard. Are there multiple competing products based on a standard and do
users have product choices? As will be seen in the description of GIFs later,
the government policies examined in this paper have definitions of standards
that include some form of developmental openness, some guidelines related
to standards-based intellectual property, and guidelines about an open
standard having multiple competing implementations.
The intersection between standards openness, interoperability, and
public policy exists in several areas: a nation’s innovation and competition
policy; the extent to which standards enable or impede the ability of
governments to perform functions and services and to promote conditions in
which the public engages in broader political processes; the role ICT
standards and interoperability play in the functioning of a society’s critical
information infrastructures such as financial systems, water control systems,
and communications systems; and the ways in which standards reflect policy
questions such as the extent of user privacy on the Internet. This section
addresses these linkages between ICT standards and governance and
examines why governments have an interest in promoting open standards.

4
Alan Davidson and Robert Morris have described how Internet standards have
implications for personal privacy, property rights, and public access to knowledge. For
specific examples of this, see Morris and Davidson (2003).
5
See section IIIA “Conceptions of Openness” in DeNardis and Tam (2007), and also
Krechmer (2005).

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National Innovation Policy and Economic Competition

Economists have extensively studied the economic effects of standards

(David and Greenstein 1990; Blind 2004). Publicly available ICT standards
provide common specifications which entrepreneurs can use to create new
products that are compatible with other products based on the same
standards. The historical traditions of the Internet’s standard-setting
institutions, and particularly the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), have always encouraged the open
publication of standards and have usually encouraged minimal intellectual
property restrictions on Internet standards. Theorists ranging from legal
scholars to economists have suggested that this open approach, in which
standards are freely published and available to use with minimal intellectual
property restrictions, maximizes innovation and produces the desirable
economic effect of full market competition among suppliers of ICT products
and services (Benkler 2006; Ghosh 2005). But as Garcia, Kale, and Danish
(2007) have suggested, “the enhanced economic value of network standards
associated with today’s economy has led many firms to seek greater control
over them in terms of how they are agreed upon and implemented.”
The ability to access and implement standards in ICT products is
directly relevant to the ability of a nation’s private institutions to compete
globally by innovating in new product areas that are compatible with a
competitor’s products. In this sense, economic growth in ICT sectors relies
upon interoperability and standardization. The degree of openness in ICT
standards, such as who can become involved in standards-setting processes,
whether the standard is published, and the extent and complexity of any
underlying intellectual property restrictions, can particularly affect
entrepreneurs in developing countries. Newer entrants in ICT technology
markets may not have been involved in the development processes of critical
standards and may not have the legal resources necessary to deal with
royalty bearing intellectual property claims embedded within standards.
Open ICT standards can provide developing countries with the opportunity
to become more competitive in technology product markets and can provide
entrepreneurial opportunities for a nation’s technology companies to engage
in product development based on universal standards. On the other hand, if
standards are proprietary, emerging markets will have a diminished chance
of becoming competitive in global technology markets. In this regard,
governments in emerging markets are particularly concerned with the
promotion of open technical standards.
The degree of openness in ICT standardization also implicates the
issue of global trade, a core governmental oversight function. Economic

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analyses of global trade policies have examined the “link between trade,
standards, and export competitiveness” (Wilson and Abiola 2003). The
World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade
(TBT) emphasizes the heightened role international standards play in the
facilitation of international trade “by improving efficiency of production and
facilitating the conduct of international trade” and asserts that WTO
members shall “ensure that technical regulations are not prepared, adopted
or applied with a view to or with the effect of creating unnecessary obstacles
to international trade. For this purpose, technical regulations shall not be
more trade-restrictive than necessary to fulfill a legitimate objective, taking
account of the risks nonfulfillment would create. Such legitimate objectives
are, inter alia: national security requirements; the prevention of deceptive
practices; protection of human health or safety, animal or plant life or health,
or the environment” (World Trade Organization).
But standards can also serve as nontariff barriers in global ICT
markets. Intellectual property rights in standards can be used to inhibit the
adoption of international standards and the development of products based
on these standards. In recent years, China has encouraged the development
of Chinese national standards such as WAPI (Wireless Local Area Network
Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure), the Chinese national standard for
wireless LAN encryption; UOF (Unified Office Format), China’s document
format for office applications; and other national standards (Gibson 2007).
Relatively closed standards are increasingly emerging as alternative trade
barriers, in contrast to open Internet standards which have tended to promote
competition and free trade.

Public Interest Effects of Standards

ICT standards can also shape public policy in unexpected ways. As an

obvious example, design decisions about encryption standards, such as
encryption key length, must mediate between different social values such as
providing strong individual privacy online, on the one hand, and supporting
law enforcement and national security functions, on the other hand. There is
a large body of literature examining how technologies and, in particular,
standards embody values and create legal architectures (Winner 1980; 1986;
Morris and Davidson 2003). Many standards directly affect online freedoms.
Some examples include authentication standards that keep user identities
private, electronic healthcare information standards that make decisions
about how citizens’ healthcare records are electronically exchanged, and
accessibility standards, such as those related to closed captioning in digital
video delivery that make decisions about the extent of access for the hearing

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impaired and for other disabilities. If standards sometimes embed such

public policy decisions, not established by legislatures but by private
standard-setting institutions, the question then becomes how these values are
reflected, or should be reflected, and what are the responsibilities of
governments to at least promote or encourage conditions that create some
legitimacy for primarily private forms of public policymaking.
The IETF process self-consciously expresses certain values. Some
examples of these values include the following: universality and competitive
openness—one objective of developing a standard is for it to become widely
used in the marketplace; participatory openness in the standard-setting
process; and the end-to-end architectural design principles specifying that
intelligence should be located at network end points rather than at central
control points (Carpenter 1996; Saltzer, Reed, and Clark 1984). Perhaps
these principles sound obvious to some, but the objective of ICT standard
setting could also be (and sometimes is) to limit a standard’s availability to
gain market dominance by restricting the variety of products based on the
standard.
The legitimacy of technical standards setting derives ultimately from
expertise but can also emanate from process. A core question relevant to any
decision-making procedure of public importance is by what procedures are
the decisions weighed. One component of legitimacy is transparency;
transparency about what is being done, how it’s being done, and who is
doing it. Another component is participatory openness. In this regard, and
considering the ways in which traditional governance can be supplanted by
technological regulation, governments have a direct interest in promoting
conditions in which the legitimacy of standards-setting organizations is
maximized through transparent and open processes.

E-Government Services and Open Government

Interoperability standards are the underpinning of numerous government

functions, including e-Government services to citizens, efficient government
information exchange among diverse agencies, and interoperable first
responder and law enforcement functions. Many information systems,
including healthcare systems, intelligent transportation systems, and “smart
grid” remote monitoring systems, are not controlled by any one entity.
Neither government, nor the nonprofit sector, nor industry controls the
entirety of these systems, heightening the need for open technologies.
Standards also affect the conditions by which the public engages in
broader political processes. For example, the electronic provisioning of
public documents is a responsibility of many governments. Public access,

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including access to public records and archives, is essential for government

accountability and for public deliberation over the efficacy of government
institutions and policies. The technical standards underlying electronic
public media, whether text, video, audio, or image, raise concerns if they
prevent governments from ensuring that electronic government archives are
accessible in the future or if they are stored in a proprietary format that
restricts user software choices in accessing documents, or if the standard
locks public records into a format that is dependent upon a single
corporation to maintain. Technologies based on open standards are similarly
necessary to enable citizen participation and input into government as many
governance institutions shift from cultures of professionalism and
bureaucracy to more participatory approaches (Noveck 2007).
Problems with standards or software incompatibility can create
public safety concerns as well as loss of faith in government. For example,
there were reports of software incompatibility during the rescue and victim
identification efforts immediately after the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami.6
Various Thai agencies and organizations were unable to exchange
documents because of incompatible proprietary document formats.
Incompatible technical standards that encumber such government services
raise questions of particular political concern. Critical infrastructure attacks
that exploit protocol vulnerabilities or use DDoS (distributed denial of
service) techniques have similar political consequences when they disrupt
routine government services. In 2007, after Estonia removed a Soviet
military monument from its capital, weeks-long denial of service attacks
targeted and crippled the functionality of some of Estonia’s state (and
private) websites.7

The Role of Governments in ICT Standards Markets

The increasing entanglements and linkages between traditional governments
and the more concealed realm of interoperability standards underlying
twenty-first-century information exchange demonstrate why governments in
advanced industrial societies are taking a greater interest in standardization
and in promoting open technical standards. The question then becomes, what
is the appropriate role of government in standardization?

6
Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Open ePolicy Group’s “Roadmap for Open
ICT Ecosystems,” September 2005.
Accessed at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/policy/roadmap.pdf.
7
See a description of the incident in The Economist (2007).

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Possible Standards Roles for Governments

“Participation in standards” can take many forms: involvement in the

development of standards; oversight or regulation of standards; funding of
standards; and procurement and adoption of standards in government
technology infrastructures. Different standards, depending on their
functionality and public interest implications, naturally compel different
levels of government concern. For example, standards directly related to
national security strategy or political processes historically have required a
higher degree of government involvement. Other types of standards might
require minimal or no government oversight. This section describes a
spectrum of different roles for governments to influence standardization.
This section is not meant to provide a complete analysis of the merits of
government standards activities in all of these areas but, rather, emphasizes
how, as components of markets and as large ICT users, governments can use
procurement policies and standards adoption to promote standards that have
favorable public interest and economic effects.

Standards Regulation

Historically, governments have had some role in regulating certain

standardization areas. For example, governments have regulated or promoted
technical characteristics of standards relating to enabling accessibility for
disabled (e.g., requiring manufacturers of televisions to include closed
captioning technologies for the hearing impaired), communications
standards such as digital broadcasting standards, and some technical
standards related to banking and health services (Marincu and McMullin
2004). National security is another sphere in which governments have
legislatively intervened in standards. For example, until the twenty-first
century, the U.S. government placed restrictions on the export of products
based on strong encryption standards because of national security and law
enforcement concerns and still has encryption export prohibitions for some
countries such as Iran, Cuba, Libya, and elsewhere. Governments have also
used civil and criminal law to restrict technologies that facilitate copyright
violations or circumvent digital rights management mechanisms. Most
governments also have had a historical role in antitrust concerns about
corporations using standards illegally for competitive advantage. 8 In a
separate sense, legal scholars have examined not only the role of government
in regulating standards but have put forth critiques of the inverse way in

8
See, for example, FTC v. Rambus; also Lemley (1996) and Weiser (2009).

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which technological standardization by the private sector is a distinct form

of regulating and, rather than being the “digital materialization of legal
standards”, some emerging classes of technological standards, “such as
digital rights management (DRM), should be analogized to legal rules”
(Benoliel 2004).
There is another, much less salutary sense in which governments
directly intervene in standards. This type of intervention is not legislative but
technical and procedural, when governments, through the use of proprietary
specifications, force citizens to use a specific software application or
hardware device in order to access government functions and public
information. Forcing citizens to use a specific technology because of a
proprietary specification is a government standards mandate. An example of
this reportedly occurred in the United States after Hurricane Katrina when
the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) established an online
registry for those wishing to register for aid. Initially, only hurricane victims
who were accessing the FEMA site with the Microsoft Internet Explorer
browser could register for aid. The use of a proprietary specification for
government citizen interactions can have the unintended side effect of
compelling citizens to use a specific product as well as possibly creating
long-term vendor lock-in.
Such restrictive government standards mandates are a distinct issue
from government procurement policies for internal government information
systems and communications platform in that the latter does not involve
communications with citizens and therefore does not require that citizens use
specific manufacturers’ products. When a government does select
technologies that interact with citizens, it is particularly important to
principles of equal access that the underlying standard is not a technology
mandate but an open standard so that it enables citizens to select from
competing but interoperable technology products. This is a significant
rationale for adopting open standards in government procurement policies
and interoperability frameworks, as will be discussed later.

Standards Development and Funding

The standards-development processes for many Internet protocols have been

inherently decentralized and distributed, such as the standards processes of
the IETF. As Werbach explains, “Where industry standards and associated
norms are well-entrenched and operating effectively, regulators need not
intervene … there is simply no reason for government to interfere with this
system. In fact, to do so would risk destabilizing the Internet industry”
(Werbach 2009).

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In the majority of areas of ICT standards, governments do not

monolithically develop standards. They do, however, participate in
standards-development processes. For example, governments, as major ICT
users, sometimes send individuals to standards organizations to give voice to
government technology requirements. Governments can also serve as
official representatives to certain international standards institutions such as
the ITU.
There are numerous types of standards organizations: regional
organizations such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute
(ETSI); official national standards bodies (NSBs) such as the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Standardization Administration
of China (SAC); and consortia, also called standards-setting organizations
(SSOs), which are nonaccredited institutions (such as the World Wide Web
Consortium, W3C) made up of interests that come together for a common
purpose (such as developing web standards). There are also industry-specific
standards organizations such as Health Level 7 International (HL7), an
institution that sets standards for interoperability of health information
technologies.
The following are just a few of the more prominent ICT standards-
setting institutions in which individuals from governments might participate
along with private industry and civil society: IETF: Internet Engineering
Task Force; W3C: World Wide Web Consortium; OASIS: Organization for
the Advancement of Structured Information Standards; IEC: International
Electrotechnical Commission; IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers; ISO: International Organization for Standardization; ITU:
International Telecommunication Union; and ECMA: European Association
for Standardizing Information and Communication Systems.
In other cases, governments can identify the need for a standard or
for increased interoperability and convene and encourage industry to
develop a standard in this area or provide accreditation for a standards-
development organization to fulfill a function.9 Governments similarly can

9
For example, HL7 is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited
standards developer (ASD) “committed to developing, publishing and promoting a
comprehensive framework for the development of health informatics standards and the
employment of the framework to produce standards specifications for health data
interchange, integration, storage and retrieval among diverse data acquisition, processing,
and handling systems.” HL7 bylaws accessed at http://www.hl7.org/about/bylaws.cfm.

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provide funding for research and development, standards education, and

national standards bodies and standards agencies.10
Almost by definition, standards are agreed upon rules among
multiple parties. Any top-down government standards development violates
this rule as well as contravening the historical traditions of Internet standards
percolating up from grassroots structures and emanating from working code.
Government intervention in standards development, other than in specific
circumstances such as national security, technical partitioning of resources
such as spectrum licenses, public safety, banking, and some other ad hoc
areas and other than in participating as one among multi-stakeholders
involved in standards development, can introduce tremendous bureaucracy
and can introduce a more slow-moving pace than necessary for rapid
innovations in ICTs.

Adoption and Procurement

Governments are enormous users of information technology and therefore,

as large users, exert a great deal of market influence based on the standards
to which adopted technologies adhere. As Kesan and Shah note, “The
government can use its procurement power to develop or support particular
code by creating or increasing the market for a particular product” (Kesan
and Shah 2005). Because of their market influence as well as the significant
public interest impacts of standards as described in the first section,
governments have an obligation to carefully establish policies about
procurement.
Governments have a special obligation to generally procure products
based on open standards for both internal governance reasons and to
promote a number of positive network externalities. Some reasons, as laid
out earlier, relate to national innovation policy, cost efficiencies, technical
obligations for interoperable information systems within government, and
for political reasons of citizen access and user choice in citizen–government
information exchange.
First, product procurement policies based on open standards should
be part of national innovation policy. Open standards, by definition, help
enable ICT innovations. In “Public procurement and innovation—
Resurrecting the demand side,” Edler and Georghiou suggest that
governments have not adequately recognized the role of demand in

10
For example, in the United States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology
fiscal year 2010 resources total $856.6 million from the Consolidated Appropriations
Act of 2010 (Public Law 111-117).

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innovation policy. The authors survey literature and research, concluding

that, in the long term, state procurement has been more effective than even
research and development investments for spurring innovation (Edler and
Georghiou 2007). This is particularly true in the area of open standards
because of their unique role of enabling market competition and new product
innovations based on common standards.
Governments are also accountable to citizens to ensure that
government services are not dependent upon or locked into a single vendor’s
products and to choose cost-effective products that naturally emanate from
the competitive markets open standards create. Governments, as parts of
markets, can choose to promote products based upon open standards that
adhere to principles of public oversight, open participation, and general
transparency to enhance the legitimacy of standards-setting processes that
make public policy decisions. Finally, regarding “open government
initiatives” and e-Government services in which information exchange
occurs directly between citizens and governments, products based on open
standards should be mandatory to ensure maximum interoperability and
citizen choice of technology product.
ICT procurement policies based on open standards are the opposite
of proprietary government standards mandates. The latter forces citizens to
buy a specific vendor’s products while product procurement policies based
on adherence to open standards inherently attempt to maximize free markets
and citizen choice. These procurement policies are also the least
interventionist of all the possible roles for governments in standardization
because they do not mandate that private industry adopt particular standards
and do not intervene directly in the standards-development process. The
following section provides an example of government procurement
strategies based on open standards—specifically GIFs.

Government Interoperability Frameworks

In many ways, government interest in open ICT standards is a late arrival

into the standards arena, particularly considering the extent of proprietary
specifications and products historically used by governments (Pedersen,
Fomin, and de Bries 2009). Since 2004, however, a number of federal
governments have introduced interoperability frameworks establishing
procurement policies for the adoption of open standards within government
information systems. This section describes four of these government
policies—South Africa, the European Union, Brazil, and Japan—although

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many others exist.11 These cases—representing nations on four continents—

were selected to provide some geographical diversity.

South Africa

South Africa released a strategic framework for e-Government

interoperability called the Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for
Information Systems in Government (version 4.1).12 The MIOS framework
provides a list of open technical standards to which product purchases made
by South African government departments must adhere. An objective of e-
Government in South Africa is not just efficiency and interoperability among
sectors of government but the ability of these sectors to exchange
information with and deliver services to the private sector and citizens. To
this end, South Africa’s framework “sets out the Government’s policies and
standards for achieving interoperability and seamless information flow
across government as well as the wider public sector.”13
The South Africa framework emphasizes principles related to
market support, scalability, cost effectiveness, and security. As such, the
selected standards should have wide market support; they should reduce the
cost of government information systems; they should be scalable and should
provide a secure information environment.
The scope of this interoperability framework is quite broad in that it
addresses intra-government information exchange as well as information
exchange between government sectors and external entities, including
citizens. The mandatory standards apply both to new government-procured
information systems and to all other existing systems. In other words,
“legacy systems will need to comply with these standards.”14 In the case of
South Africa’s e-Government interoperability framework, technical policy

11
See, for example, the Australian Government Interoperability Framework at
http://www.finance.gov.au/e-government/service-improvement-and-
delivery/interoperability-frameworks.html; the Malaysian Government Interoperability
Framework (August 2003) available at http://www.mampu.
gov.my/mampu/pdf/ISPlan/ispdoc/Interoperability%20Framework.pdf; as well as
interoperability frameworks issued in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, France,
Estonia, Denmark, and elsewhere. For additional information, see UNDP (2007).
12
The information in this section is drawn from the South African government’s MIOS
version 4.1 document, Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for Information
Systems in Government, accessed at
http://www.dpsa.gov.za/documents/egov/MIOSVer4_1_2007.pdf.
13
South Africa’s MIOS version 4.1 section 1.1.3.
14
South Africa’s MIOS version 4.1 section 1.1.3.

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and standards were divided into three layers of interoperability:

interconnection, data interoperability, and information access.
The framework includes a definition of what the South African
government views as constituting required characteristics of an open
standard. As stated in MIOS version 4.1 section 2.3.1, a standard is
considered open if it meets all of the following criteria:

ƒ It should be maintained by a non-commercial organization;

ƒ Participation in the ongoing development work is based on
decision-making processes that are open to all interested
parties;
ƒ Open access: all may access committee documents, drafts
and completed standards free of cost or for a negligible fee;
ƒ It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute and use
the standard free of cost;
ƒ The intellectual rights required to implement the standard
(e.g. essential patent claims) are irrevocably available,
without any royalties attached;
ƒ There are no reservations regarding reuse of the standard;
ƒ There are multiple implementations of the standard.15

If a fully open standard does not exist in certain technical areas, the
framework requires that the standard be selected based on the degree of the
standards’ openness.
The MIOS framework includes 10 pages listing the required e-
Government standards for interconnection, data interoperability, and
information access. The following lists just a few of the required standards
to provide a flavor of the framework’s technical specificity:

Interconnection Standards

Internet message format: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME

(RFC 2045, RFC 2046, RFC 2047, RFC 2048, and RFC 2077)

Directory: X.500 core schema (ISO/IEC95948). Lightweight Directory

Access Protocol LDAP V3 (RFC 4510) is to be used for general-purpose
directory user access

IP encapsulation: Security Encapsulating Security Payload (RFC 2406)

15
South Africa’s MIOS version 4.1 section 2.3.1.

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

Data Interoperability Standards

Metadata/MetaLanguage: XML (Extensible Markup Language)

XML Security mark-up: SAML v2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language)

Web service request delivery: Simple Object Access Protocol SOAP v1.2

Information Access Standards

Hypertext interchange formats: Those parts of Hypertext Markup Language

HTML v4.0 and XHTML implemented in common by Firefox v2.0 or later,
and MS Internet Explorer v6 or later, plus their interoperable extensions

Character sets and alphabets: UNICODE ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000

Working Office Document formats (word-processing, spreadsheet,

presentation) UTF-8/ASCII Formatted Text; Open Document Format (ODF)
v1.0 (ISO26300) and later Oasis versions; Comma-Separated Values (CSV)
RFC4180.

This provides only a narrow sample of the South African standards, which
can be seen in their entirety in the MIOS version 4.1 document.

European Interoperability Framework

The European Commission issued its first version of the European

Interoperability Framework (EIF) in 2004. 16 The framework sought to
facilitate, at a pan-European level, the interoperability of government
services among government entities and between government entities and
citizens. The EIF would augment national frameworks by addressing pan-
European interoperability requirements not able to be sufficiently addressed
on a purely national basis. The EIF defines interoperability simply as “the
ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems and of

16
Formally called the European Interoperability Framework for Pan-European e-
Government Services, available at: http://standarder.oio.dk/English/

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the business processes they support to exchange data and to enable the
sharing of information and knowledge.”17
Like the South African framework, the EIF includes a set of
principles upon which any pan-European e-Government services should be
predicated. The EIF defined eight principles:

1. Accessibility so that e-Government services are available to all;

2. Multilingualism at the presentation level;
3. Security;
4. Privacy and personal data protection;
5. Subsidiarity, meaning that the framework should not interfere with the
internal workings of member states;
6. Use of open standards;
7. Open source software should be “considered favourably alongside
proprietary alternatives”; and
8. Multilateral solutions, which seems to indicate the benefits of network
effects.

As indicated in principle six, the EIF states that open standards

should be used as a way of achieving pan-European interoperability
objectives. The EIF further defines the minimal characteristics that a
standard must have to be considered an open standard, stated verbatim as
follows:

ƒ The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-

for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs
on the basis of an open decision-making procedure
available to all interested parties (consensus or majority
decision etc.);
ƒ The standard has been published and the standard
specification document is available either freely or at a
nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy,
distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee;
ƒ The intellectual property—i.e. patents possibly present—of
(parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a
royalty free basis.18

17
European Interoperability Framework version 1.0, page 5. During the writing of this
paper, a second draft version of the European Interoperability Framework was under
consideration.
18
EIF version 1.0 section 1.3, page 9.

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

The EIF further recommends that the national interoperability frameworks of

member states also use open standards.19 What the EIF does not do, however,
is include specifics about the actual standards that would presumably enable
the fulfillment of pan-European interoperability.
During the researching of this paper, the European Commission
began a revision process of the EIF. The European Commission made a draft
document of the EIF version 2.0 available online for a period of stakeholder
comments. 20 Depending on the final outcome of the EIF version 2.0, the
information described in this section could change significantly.

Brazil

The Brazilian government also developed a GIF, first in 2006 and then
updated in 2008.21 The framework, called e-PING Electronic Government
Interoperability Standards, defines a minimum set of policies and technical
specifications necessary to provide the interoperability required for
electronic government services and interactions within government as well
as between government and society and globally with other governments and
world markets. The e-PING standards are mandatory within the federal
government but other sectors can voluntarily adopt e-PING standards and
policies as appropriate.
The Brazilian electronic government interoperability framework (e-GIF)
addresses interoperability in five areas:

1. Interconnectivity,
2. Security,
3. Means of access,
4. Organization and exchange of information, and
5. Areas for electronic government integration.

It also sets forth general policies to which all interoperability sectors should
adhere. For example, universally mainstream Internet technologies should be
adopted, such as browsers serving as the primary interface for accessing
government information systems and XML as the primary standard for
exchanging data. Another policy establishes the criteria that all e-PING
19
EIF version 1.0 section 3.4, page 26.
20
The draft EIF version 2.0 and stakeholder comments are available online at
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728 (URL last accessed August 4, 2010).
21
Brazilian government’s e-PING Electronic Government Interoperability Standards
Reference Document Version 4.0 (December 2008) accessed at
www.governoeletronico.gov.br/anexos/e-ping-versao-4-0-in-english.

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specifications should have wide market support as a way to reduce costs and
risks. Another e-PING policy is transparency in that the actual e-PING
documents should be publicly available. Information privacy is another
overarching policy. Technological conditions should preserve all necessary
information privacy, including for citizens, private industry, and government
agencies in compliance with existing laws.
The framework also cites “Preferred Adoption of Open Standards”
as one of its overarching policies: “Whenever possible, open standards will
be adopted in the technical specifications. Proprietary standards shall be
accepted, temporarily and during transitions, however keeping in mind the
aim to replace them as soon as there are conditions to migrate.” 22 The
Brazilian framework defines open standards as follows:

ƒ Allow interoperability among different applications and

platforms, both internal and external;
ƒ Are free for all to implement, with no royalty or fee;
ƒ Can be fully and independently implemented by multiple
computer program manufacturers, on multiple platforms,
and its use is not subject to the payment of any intellectual
or industrial property right.23

The Brazilian framework includes a matrix of actual standards that are either
formally adopted, recommended for consideration, or in some other category
such as undergoing transition, under review, or subject to possible future
consideration. The full matrix of approved standards can be found in the e-
PING interoperability framework, but just a few of the approved standards
follow to provide an idea of the technical granularity necessary in such a
framework. Within the interconnectivity sector, the framework recommends
SOAP v1.2,24 as defined by the W3C as the structured information exchange
standard on a decentralized and/or distributed platform; recommends
S/MIME 25 v3 for email content security; and recommends for XML

22
e-PING Electronic Government Interoperability Standards Reference Document
Version 4.0 (December 2008), page 9.
23
e-PING Electronic Government Interoperability Standards Reference Document
Version 4.0 (December 2008), page 57.
24
SOAP specifications can be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part0/
25
Standards available at RFC 3369 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3369.txt), RFC 3370
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3370.txt), RFC 2631 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2631.txt),
RFC 3850 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3850.txt), RFC 3851
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3851.txt), and RFC 3852 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3852.txt).

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Signatures XML (XMLsig) signature Syntax and Processing26 as set out by

the W3C.
In addition to specifying the actual adopted e-PING standards, the
framework addresses other important ancillary areas such as auditing and
conformity, noting that federal compliance with the specifications is
essential for the success of the interoperability framework. It also describes
the need for legal oversight and support from the Legal Advisory staff of the
Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management, to ensure that the
interoperability framework’s contents are compliant with existing national
laws.27

Japan

In 2007, the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry published

the “Interoperability Framework for Information Systems” calling for
government procurement policies based on adherence to open standards.28
Japan’s interoperability framework provides guidelines for the federal
government, local governments, and agencies. It also suggests that the
guidelines could be helpful for nongovernmental information systems. The
framework considers requirements for interoperability to include hardware
components, software, and communication standards. Japan’s framework
identifies the benefits of interoperability as twofold: making the user
experience more efficient and reducing information system costs. Concerns
about lack of interoperability involve historical problems of different
agencies and ministries being unable to exchange information, concerns
about lack of application portability and reusability, and problems related to
vendor lock-in. For example, the framework gives an example of electronic
document “Lock-in to a specific vendor unique technology” and associated
problems and resource-intensive requirements related to converting
documents previously stored in a unique vendor format to an open standard
format.
The Japanese frameworks policy (section 4.2.3 of the framework)
preferring open standards states, in particular, that software interfaces, such

26
Standard available at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsigcore/
27
e-PING Electronic Government Interoperability Standards Reference Document
Version 4.0 (December 2008), page 16.
28
The information contained in this section reflects the English translation of
“Interoperability Framework for Information Systems” (June 2007) issued by the
Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and published on the website of
Japan’s Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA) accessed at
http://www.ipa.go.jp/software/open/ossc/doc_inope_e.html.

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as application programming interfaces and communication standards, based

on open standards should be favored in ICT procurement when possible.
Japan’s rationale for favoring openness in standards focuses primarily on
vendor competition and user choice. In this regard, interoperability should
not be achieved through a single vendor solution but through open standards
that can be implemented and adopted by many vendors. In laying out
definitions for the interoperability framework, the document defines
“making an IT System Open” as “Increasing the number of vendors who can
enter into the governmental procurement, maintenance and operation
services of governmental information systems in the manner of reducing the
dependency on a vendor specific technology by breaking down an
information system into individually procurable and replaceable standard
components.”29 This emphasis on multiple, competing products is codified in
the Japanese framework’s formal definition of an open standard:

1. The standard was established in an open participatory process and

the specification is published and implementable;
2. Anyone can adopt the standard;
3. There are multiple products on the market that are based on the
standard.

The Japanese framework imposes some additional considerations for

assessing the openness of a standard. For example, the standard should be
maintained and revised by a “nonprofit organization” that is open to anyone
and that employs democratic procedures. There should be no imposed
limitation on the usage and implementation of the standards and, if there are
underlying intellectual property restrictions on the implementation of the
standard, it should be able to be licensed either on a royalty-free basis or on
reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms. The definition further
notes that a de facto open standard should result in a market of more than
one product (developed by more than one vendor) conforming to the
standard.
Japan’s interoperability framework does not list specific standards
and technologies that meet its criteria of open standards. Rather, the Ministry
of Economy, Trade, and Industry separately created a “Technical Reference
Model” (TRM) and advises agencies and government offices to develop
their own technical profile based on the TRM.30
29
Ibid., page 3.
30
Japan’s “Technical Reference Model (TRM) for the Procurement of Information
Systems 2008” is available in Japanese at
http://www.meti.go.jp/policy/it_policy/tyoutatu/trm20.pdf. Standards and technologies

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

A Comparative View of GIFs

One common element of the four GIFs described above is what they do not
specify. None of the frameworks contain a list of specific software or
hardware products that federal agencies must procure or a list of
manufacturers from which agencies must purchase products. The
overarching concern is interoperability, efficiency, and user choice rather
than manufacturer or product. Some countries, such as South Africa and
Brazil, list specific open standards with which agency product selections
should comply. Others, such as the first version of the EIF and Japan’s GIF,
do not list specific standards but ask that agencies choose their own
standards requirements based on meeting the framework’s criteria for what
constitutes an open standard.
An aspect of interoperability that only the Brazilian framework
specifically addresses is the issue of conformance, auditing, and
commensurability with existing law. Although this topic has not been
universally addressed in written interoperability frameworks, it was a major
topic of discussion among government officials at the UNDP’s meeting on
GIFs in 2010. As frameworks are put into practice, questions about how to
evaluate the efficacy of policies and about how to enforce policies inherently
arise.
Finally, all four GIFs include a specific definition of what
constitutes an open standard. Although each nation has its own definition of
standards openness, the definitions generally address similar areas such as
the process by which the standard is developed, whether and how the
standard can be accessed, and a policy on a standard’s intellectual property
restrictions.

Recommendations for e-Government Interoperability

Frameworks
Governments increasingly do not simply assume that “all will be well” with
standards. ICT standards have become an invisible but powerful form of
technological rulemaking with consequences for national innovation policy,

are grouped into four high-level categories in the TRM: application software, application
platforms (operating systems, DBMSs, middleware, etc.), “external environment”
(networks), and “common platforms” (including security and management).

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public safety, knowledge policy, and government efficiency and openness.

Even in the twenty-first century, interoperability through standards is not a
given but something that must be promoted. Lack of interoperability or
problems with standards can create social or economic harm or contribute to
a loss of faith in government. The use of proprietary specifications can
impede government functions and services or make access to public
information dependent upon a single company. These same proprietary
specifications can limit the pace of ICT innovation and be used as technical
barriers to trade in global technology markets. Standards, once widely
entrenched, have a conservative momentum that creates collective action
challenges for the adoption of important open standards.
This paper has suggested that it is in the best interest of governments
to promote open standards, both to enable e-Government services and to
create positive externalities related to innovation and democratic openness.
The rationale for promoting open standards is technical, economic, and
political. The technical rationale is to promote maximum interoperability to
enable the universal and efficient exchange of information among
technologies, regardless of manufacturer or geographical region. The
economic rationale is to foster an environment of competition among
products based on the standard, and to provide fertile ground for national
entrepreneurship and innovation. By an economic definition, open standards
inherently prevent anticompetitive and monopolistic practices, promote
rather than restrict global trade, and provide opportunities for emerging
markets to enter global information technology markets. The political
rationale for open standards is to contribute to efficient and accountable
government functions ranging from issues of political representation,
disaster response, and the archiving of public documents. The rationale for
open standards-setting processes is to provide procedural norms and
methods that maximize the legitimacy of standards-setting institutions to
make decisions that establish public policy in areas related to critical
information infrastructures, social policies, and the ability of citizens to
participate in political processes.
Governments, as major components of markets and as large ICT
customers, can use procurement policies based on principles of openness to
promote standards that have favorable public interest and economic effects.
This paper has suggested that one vehicle to communicate government
procurement policies for products based on open standards is through GIF.
GIFs provide guidelines for how government agencies should adopt
technology specifications for ICTs. Each GIF will reflect unique national
circumstances, but based on the review of government procurement policies
described above, as well as recommendations published in the United

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Nations Development Program’s e-Government Interoperability Guide,31 the

following are some normative recommendations for the procedural
development, architectural content, and governance of GIFs.

A Working Definition of Open Standards

Governments developing procurement policies based on open standards

must grapple with the question of what constitutes an “open standard.” An
interoperability framework without a definition of open standards would be
meaningless because it would provide no guidance about what to procure. In
the wider context of standardization, some definitions refer to open
standards exclusively in terms of achieving technical interoperability
between software or hardware products based on the standard, regardless of
what company manufactured the product. Economic definitions of open
standards are based on effects: effects on market competition, efficiency,
improvements to national economic competitiveness, or resulting product
innovation. For governments concerned with issues of accountability,
transparency, and questions related to the legitimacy of private standards-
setting organizations to make technical decisions with public interest
implications, definitions must also address procedural aspects of the
standards-setting process itself.
This paper recommends that governments adopt a working
definition of open standards that reflects normative principles of
participatory and economic openness, competition, technical interoperability,
universality, accountability, and transparency. Accordingly, this framework
will define openness in three contexts: a standard’s development, its
implementation, and its use. The framework will include requirements of
participatory openness and transparency in development; the absence of
hindrances to full competition and multiple competing implementations; and
requirements of maximum technical interoperability among heterogeneous
systems and therefore user choice.

Open in Development

If standards development were always a purely technical exercise and, once

developed, if standards had no political or economic implications, then the
nature of the standards-setting process would be irrelevant. If one believes

31
This section benefitted greatly from the recommendations of the United Nations
Development Program’s “e-Government Interoperability: Guide.” available at:
http://www.apdip.net/projects/gif/GIF-Guide.pdf.

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that standards have public interest implications, then the process of

establishing this form of public policy, particularly outside of the purview of
traditional governance structures, is critical. To confer legitimacy on
standards-setting institutions that make design decisions with economic and
political consequences, the process must adhere to baseline principles of
participatory openness, well-defined procedures and appeals processes, and
transparency.
Participatory openness in standards-development processes requires
that institutions not prohibit the involvement of interested parties based on
institutional or corporate affiliation, government backing, or credentials. A
completely open process should include well-defined procedures for
developing standards, including norms for publicly recording dissent and a
publicly available appeals process for those that disagree with the outcome
of the standards process. An open standards body should also have well-
defined rules for dealing with procedural violations.
Numerous types of transparency should underlie open standards-
development processes:

(1) Disclosure of membership, if there is a formal membership;

(2) Disclosure of funding sources, if applicable;
(3) Disclosure of the organizational affiliations of participants;
(4) Disclosure of process, including the general approach to standards
selection (whether based on majoritarian rule, rough consensus, or any
other approach), appeals procedures, and information about who
possesses the ultimate authority in standards decisions;
(5) Disclosure of a standard’s intellectual property rights, if any;32 and
(6) Recordation and publication of proceedings, minute meetings, and
electronic deliberations. This type of information openness is necessary
to allow for the possibility of public oversight.

To some, these practices might seem like obvious requirements for

standards setting, but in reality, many institutions, including ISO, conduct
closed door sessions that are not recorded or made available for general
public oversight. It is also important to note that, even with the degree of
participatory openness recommended here, there are still inherent barriers
such as the need for a great degree of technical knowledge, time, language,
technical access, understanding of institutional cultural norms, and often

32
For a discussion of how standards-based intellectual property rights disclosure might
be done in practice, see Lemley (2002).

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financial backing in order to spend time participating and traveling to

standardization activities.

Open in Implementation

Beyond the standards-setting process, the open standard itself, the tool
necessary to develop products, should be openly published, preferably with
no fee to access the standard. There are three reasons for this. First, public
awareness and oversight of a standard’s policy implications are not possible
without the ability to view the actual standard. Publishing a standard is also
the lynchpin of enabling economic competition among products based on the
specification. An unpublished standard is a proprietary specification that
precludes the possibility of innovation based on the specification. Finally, a
standard should be freely published so that the cost of accessing the standard
is not transferred to citizens. For a standard to be completely open in its
implementation there should be no fee associated with accessing the
standard.
The most controversial characteristic of maximum openness in a
standard’s implementation addresses the issue of intellectual property
(Lemley 2002). To promote maximum competition, government
procurement policies should give preference to standards available to
implement in products on a royalty-free basis, if available, or at least to
standards made available on a RAND basis.

Open in Use

Once implemented within a hardware or software product, an open standard

has effects on user choice, on competition and innovation, and on technical
interoperability. A freely published standard has the potential to enable
multiple companies to develop competing products based on the standard. A
standard available without intellectual property restrictions or with minimal
restrictions allows companies to develop competing but interoperable
products without licensing costs that raise the price of technology products
for consumers. The effect is to maximize the possibility of competitive
offerings, thereby avoiding single vendor lock-in and providing maximum
user choice.
This degree of openness is particularly important for standards with
direct bearing on issues of public concern—such as individual civil liberties
online, core government functions, and the archiving of electronic
government documents. For governments with open information policies, it

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is particularly important that unclassified public information is accessible in

open formats that promote transparency, user choice, and civic engagement.

Guiding Principles for Interoperability Frameworks

GIFs should also include a statement of guiding principles to which the
framework adheres. Standards evolve over time but GIF principles are more
fixed. Once developed, these guiding principles can seem obvious or trivial,
belying the difficult policy process that can lead to their formulation. At a
minimum, the framework should reflexively meet the requirements it lays
out for standards. In other words, if a GIF recommends transparency in
standards processes, it should recommend commensurate transparency in the
process of developing the interoperability framework. One obvious
challenge in translating principles into strategy is that many of the values
reflected can be in tension. For example, values of privacy often come into
conflict with values of data openness.
The following are general recommendations for eight overarching
principles to which a GIF should meet, although principles will vary from
country to country depending on national priorities.

1. Accessibility: Most e-GIFs will include a statement of accessibility

with wording such as “e-GIF specifications should strive to make
information available to all, regardless of such characteristics as
disability, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, location, or Internet
device used, and should focus on making government information
easy to search, find, and use, and easily translatable at the
presentation layer.”
2. Interoperability: An overarching goal of e-GIFs is to select the
specifications and characteristics that enable the interoperable flow
of information among governments, citizens, and businesses so
interoperability is an obvious guiding principle.
3. Information diversity: GIFs should not only address alphanumeric
text but also the audio, video, and image information and records
that are now a routine part of twenty-first-century government
operations and public records. Technical architectures addressed in
GIFs must be capable of supporting these multimedia norms and
must ensure that the information will survive and be accessible in
the future.
4. Privacy: GIFs should meet legal requirements of information
privacy for citizens, industry, and government entities. The privacy

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

principle should address the issue of personal data protection as well

as the ability of citizens to access open government data without
formal registration or technological tracking.
5. Security: e-GIFs should address requirements for security features
that ensure the integrity of data and the reliable transmission of
information and that prevent unauthorized tampering or interception
of information and provide means for authenticating data.
6. Market and cost efficiency: e-GIFs should give preference to open
standards and semantic structures that are already established, that
provide for product choices among different suppliers, and that are
consistent with ICT industry trends.
7. Openness: e-GIF principles should include a statement of openness
such as “All e-GIF guidelines should give preference, wherever
possible to open standards that are vendor and product neutral and
developed in an open process. Government and public data should
be open, within the bounds of existing laws.”
8. Transparency: The process leading to the e-GIF, including public
and industry commentary on the e-GIF, as well as the e-GIF
document itself and the standards and technologies it recommends
should be publicly available.

Implementation, Governance, and Compliance

An e-GIF is just a document. Translating guidelines into actual practice
requires political resolve, an operational understanding about how to
implement the strategy through product procurement, and an ongoing
method to ensure infrastructural and organizational compliance with
interoperability framework guidelines. The following sections address each
of these practical requirements.

Creating Political Will for e-GIFs

An e-GIF is most effective when part of an overall national e-Governance

agenda. For many countries, this overall strategy includes several
components: an open government directive about making unclassified
information publicly accessible in open formats that promote transparency,
citizen technology choice, and civic engagement,33 a strategy for improving
33
For example, U.S. President Barack Obama’s first executive action upon taking office
was the Open Government Memorandum calling for a more transparent and participatory

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interoperability and efficiency within internal government infrastructures as

well as between government and citizens, and application-specific
interoperability strategies for important areas of information policy such as
standards for e-Health and critical information infrastructures.
Based on an analysis of existing e-GIFs, the political momentum for
developing e-GIFs has typically emanated from a nation’s highest executive
office. The actual development of an e-GIF has been spearheaded by a lead
agency or project office with overall responsibility for the final
recommendations of the e-GIF, in conjunction with a working group that
engages multiple agencies and stakeholders, possibly through a national
standards advisory council drawing upon experts from industry, academia,
and nongovernmental organizations. e-GIFs will have significant effects on
citizens and private industry so it is important for the lead e-GIF
development agency to seek stakeholder input during the process of e-GIF
formulation and implementation as well as to seek ongoing engagement
about the effects of interoperability frameworks once implemented.34 Draft
versions of e-GIFs should be publicized and allow for a period of public
comment.
Finally, most interoperability frameworks give preference to
internationally accepted open standards that are supported by global ICT
markets and that will have a necessary level of market support and longevity.
Engagement with regional and global trading partners, as well as private ICT
industry, can help ensure that the interoperability framework considers
relevant international interoperability requirements as well as national
requirements.

A Layered Technical Reference Model

Translating an interoperability framework into actual practice requires

decisions about which products to procure based on adherence to the
interoperability guidelines outlined in e-GIFs. It is the recommendation of
this paper that e-GIFs or accompanying documents not include an actual list

government. See Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,
“Transparency and Open Government” January 21, 2009, available at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transparency_and_Open_Government/
34
South Africa’s MIOS version 4.1 section 1.7.1 states, “Continual engagement of all
MIOS stakeholders is a fundamental objective. Government Departments and their
agencies, organs of state, local Government, industry and the citizen are all encouraged
to comment and suggest ways of improving interoperability, and to provide support on
the implementation of the MIOS.”

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

of products that meet these guidelines.35 Keeping this product list updated
would be difficult considering the rapid pace of innovation in ICT markets
and would preclude the ability of individual departments to make decisions
based on agency-specific requirements. The focus should be on adherence to
standards and interoperability rather than on specific products.
It is, however, the recommendation of this paper that e-GIFs include
a detailed list of standards to which ICT products procured by governments
should comply. This list should either be included within the e-GIF
publication (e.g., as in the case of the Brazilian framework) or in a separate
technical reference document (e.g., as in the case of Japan’s framework).
Most technical reference models reflect the evolutionary nature of
standards by identifying where in the life cycle each standard resides. For
example, some standards are identified as “emerging,” meaning that they are
presently under review or slotted for future consideration. Others are
“current” recommendations that have been formally reviewed and approved
for current use. Other standards are identified as waning, or “fading,” in that
they are being phased out and replaced.36
The technical reference model should be consistent with industry
norms of presenting and understanding technical specifications using a
layered taxonomy such as the following categories:

Network Interconnection
Data Interoperability
Content Management and Metadata
Security
Web-based Services
Presentation Layer
Application Layer

There are countless alternatives for creating technical reference model

taxonomies and each major taxonomic category would be further divided
into sub-categories. Depending on country priorities, the taxonomy could
also include ad hoc topics such as “standards for e-Health” or “standards for
e-Learning.”

35
The United States has policies specifying “technology neutral” software procurement.
See the United States Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), a set of rules governing the
procurement process of U.S. executive branch agencies; Office of Management and
Budget memorandum M-04-16, July 1, 2004,
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda_fy04_m04-16/
36
For more information, see the United Nations Development Program’s “e-Government
Interoperability: Guide.” available at http://www.apdip.net/projects/gif/GIF-Guide.pdf.

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Compliance37

Governments also must grapple with the issue of insuring operational

compliance with interoperability frameworks. Prior to implementation,
executive or legislative actions can be part of creating the necessary
momentum, but there are many other actions for incentivizing compliance:

1. During government request for proposal processes, requiring that vendors

certify compliance with national interoperability standards requirements;
2. Enlisting agencies in framework development and educating agencies
about the importance of national interoperability frameworks;
3. Disseminating the technical reference model to appropriate procurement
channels;
4. Requesting service level agreements (SLAs) for interoperability when
contracting with vendors and consider requesting SLAs among agencies
for inter-agency systems.

Once interoperability framework implementation begins, some

governments have sought compliance through:

1. Linking budgetary approval to the ability of agencies to demonstrate

compliance;38
2. Providing incentives and bonuses to public service employees whose
work is compliant with new e-Government requirements;39 and
3. Forming a peer working group of agency CIOs (chief information
officer) to monitor compliance, in partnership with selected participants
from academia, industry, and civil society.

At an absolute minimum, interoperability compliance should be

certified through voluntary self-assessments on the part of individual
agencies and through requirements during RFP (request for proposals)
procurement processes that vendors certify in their proposals that their
technology products comply with e-GIF specifications.

37
This section was informed by a working group discussion on e-GIF compliance and
monitoring held on May 6, 2010, at the Government Interoperability Framework
Conference 2010 UNDP meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
38
For example, the government of Colombia.
39
For example, the government of Chile.

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 DeNardis: E-Governance Policies for Interoperability and Open Standards

Conclusion
Meeting the obligations of twenty-first-century e-Governance, including
open government initiatives, requires a national information infrastructure
strategy based on adherence to open information and communication
technology standards. The technical rationale for open standards is to
promote interoperability within government infrastructures regardless of
technology manufacturer. A high degree of technical interoperability is
particularly important for government functions such as disaster response,
direct citizen services, and the archiving of public documents. Technology
procurement policies based on adherence to open standards also produce
positive economic externalities. As large information technology users,
governments are significant components of technology markets, particularly
in the developing world. Internal government procurement choices create
momentum for open standards that encourage innovation and can facilitate
the economic effect of full market competition among suppliers of
information technology products and services.
One vehicle for governments to establish product procurement
policies based on open standards is through electronic government
interoperability frameworks (e-GIFs) providing guidelines for how agencies
should adopt technology specifications for information and communication
technologies. Each e-GIF will reflect unique national circumstances, but
should lay out guiding principles for open standards such as openness,
security, interoperability, and transparency and should develop a working
definition of open standards that defines openness in development, openness
in implementation, and openness in use. Evaluating standards based on
principles and procedural and implementational criteria is inherently a more
neutral position than evaluating standards based on who or what institution
originally initiated the standard. Translating frameworks into actual practice
requires a technical reference model of approved open standards to use in
government procurement of information systems as well as operational
systems of compliance.
Government procurement policies based on open standards are the
opposite of proprietary government standards mandates. Mandating products
based on proprietary standards compels citizens to purchase a specific
vendor’s products. Procurement policies based on adherence to open
standards inherently attempt to promote free markets and citizen choice.
These procurement policies are also the least interventionist of all possible
standardization roles for governments because they do not mandate that
private industry adopt particular standards and do not intervene directly in
the standards-development process.

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