Archive for the ‘Norway’ tag
Norway tests e-voting
Norway The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development will carry out e-voting pilots during the local elections in September 2011 with a purpose to establish a secure electronic solution that facilitates democracy. A point presented as key element by Oslo: “the current high level of reliability in the holding of elections, based on the principle of the secret ballot, must be confirmed”.
Open Norway: Norwegian Broadcasting Moves to OpenOffice and ODF
Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.
The first larger institution, Norway’s national radio and TV corporation, Norsk rikkringkasting (NRK), is now taking the move to OpenOffice seriously. The conversion is based on the better ODF support, therefore the NRK is running many of its clients on Mac OS X because the Mac version of Microsoft’s Office Suite doesn’t support the open document format. Another reason for the move is the Microsoft Office licensing costs.
From the first of March the majority of the 4,300 NRK clients will run OpenOffice as the standard. The 850 or so Mac systems will get OpenOffice installed in the coming weeks, even thin clients will use it. Only administrative systems will continue to use both office suite versions, with users to decide which one they prefer.
Successful Pilot Project
Before the announced conversion, the NRK has already begun a successful pilot project in Tyholt that, according to project leader Steinar Bjørlykke, surprisingly went without a hitch. Only a couple of Visual Basic scripts and template layouts caused some problems with a few documents with embedded audio files, which was resolved with some plugins. Visual Basic was to be avoided as much as possible for the scripting problem.
A benefit was also noticed in that OpenOffice opened some Word and Excel documents significantly faster than the corresponding Microsoft programs.
Source: NRKbeta site
Nyílt norvég törvény
A norvég kormányzat szeptember végén elfogadta azt az új törvényt, amely az állami szektor egészében kötelezően használatos IT-szabványokról rendelkezik. 2010. január elseje után valamennyi állami weboldalra nézve kötelező a nyílt dokumentumszabvány használata. Mivel az állampolgárok demokratikus jogai közé tartozik a közadatokhoz és a kormányzati szolgáltatásokhoz történő hozzáférés, az állami dokumentumokat és weboldalakat mindenki számára – a használt szoftverektől függetlenül – biztosítani kell.
