Germany committing to ODF and open document standards

Digital sovereignty is becoming vitally important. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.

So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments. They say:

Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the path to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.

The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in public administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It is commissioning the Standardization Board to implement this.

More information (in German) on this page. Also see the updates from Schleswig-Holstein moving to LibreOffice.