Taiwan Launched a 3-year Project In Order To Adopt Open Document Format

Although the central government in Taiwan had worked out a national file format standard named CNS-15251 in 2009, they didn't push and force government bodies to use it. Nevertheless, since UK government selected Open Document Format to meet user's needs in July 2014, the National Information and Communications Initiative Committee (NICI), a working group composed with many departments under Executive Yuan in Taiwan, started a series of meetings and made a resolution to include ODF into the national standard (named ODF-CNS15251, which is actually ODF 1.2) and actively migrate this national standard in all government units.

In NICI's resolution, they defined "open files" as "files which don't need to rely on a certain software to open." They also mentioned that all the government bodies should use ODF-CNS15251 for editable document file, and PDF or HTML for uneditable document file.

Therefore, National Development Council (NDC), a first level unit under Executive Yuan, launched a 3-year project and split the migration into three stages:

Stage 1: Before the bottom of 2015, all the downloadable files on web sites which belongs to any government unit, should use ODF-CNS15251 or PDF file format. All the old files on web sites should be converted to ODF-CNS15251 or PDF too.

Stage 2: Before the bottom of 2016, all the files provided and exchanged between government bodies, or between government units and non-government units or enterprises should use ODF-CNS15251 or PDF file format.

Stage 3: Since 2017, ask all the government bodies to use software which can create and edit ODF-CNS15251 and can be downloaded freely forever.

This project was launched in August 2015. NDC entrusted the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT), which is an NPO targeting on promoting free and open source software, and Gjun information Co., Ltd., which is a software cram school, to execute this project. In this project, 13 explanation sessions are held in different counties and cities of Taiwan, including outside island counties like Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang (aka Matzu). Lecturers and open source community members from SLAT are responsible to explain why and how to migrate to ODF. Besides, many real training courses are held too. The FOSS experts from SLAT are responsible for planning the course guidelines and examples in these training courses, and training lecturers in Gjun. Then lecturers of Gjun will be responsible all the training courses.

Besides NDC's project, there have been several successful stories migrating OpenOffice and LibreOffices all over Taiwan. Coretronics is a successful example for big enterprises to migrate LibreOffices. In the project of Coretronics, OSS Integral Institution Company, which was founded by a senior open source community and is experted in Open Office and LibreOffice customization and service, is responsible for helping them since 2010. Fo-Guan-Shan, which is a very big Buddist group, also migrated to OpenOffice successfully in 2014. Eric Sun, the execute secretary of Open Source Software Application Consulting Center, which is a project under the Ministry of Education and executed by SLAT, helped Fo-Guan-Shan to migrate OpenOffice. Finally, in March 2015, Yi-Lan County government also launched a project to migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. This project is led by the Office of Information Administration, Planning Department in Yi-Lan County, and is executed by Sunjun Information Service Company, which was founded by many open source community members and experts. In LibreOffice Conference 2015, Franklin Weng, the President of Board of Directors in SLAT, shared the successful stories of Yi-Lan County and Coretronics in Migration track, also shared the status about the ODF migration in Taiwan.

SLAT will then cooperate with The Document Foundation, to help this migration project.