Thursday, September 22, 2005

Media update

Managing Information - IBM Achieves National Archives Approval For Records Management

CIO.com - IBM Warns on Open Documents
"In a subtle rebuke to Microsoft, IBM is warning vendors will have to be far more responsive to the mandates of government and business as governments around the world embrace open standards and open source.The warning came after the US State of Massachusetts unveiled plans earlier this month to phase out Microsoft Office in favour of office productivity suites that support an open-document format from the OASIS standards body."

Hold the Front Page - Editor withdraws FOI complaint to avoid harming future cases
"A weekly newspaper editor has called for the Information Commissioner's office to "get some fire in its belly" after he withdrew a complaint concerning the Freedom of Information Act."

Eastern daily Press -Landowner unhappy over Met Office loss
"Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that Norwich was in a strong position until it emerged that farmer Martin Kemp did not want to sell his land to allow the deal to be completed."

Contract Journal - Act helps bidders raise their game
"Contractors are using the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to sharpen up bidding techniques and gain information on failed bids, using third parties to protect their identities."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If people continually let the Commissioner off the hook, then how is he ever going to get any fire in his belly?

Anonymous said...

The Contract Journal article shows a simple way of fighting back against companies who use FOI to create data services. Simply publish FOI requests and responses! This will discourage data mining and reduce the number of commercial FOI requests. Incidently some FOI request tracking systems such as Compliance Tracker can automatically publish these requests as well as the responses.