We're pretty excited about the "Global Development Commons" concept that USAID's Administrator Henrietta Fore is recently promoting (see her video on this below). And an upcoming "Document Freedom Day" I think shows a key potential path to build the GDC with a focus on open standards.

The GDC concept is, in brief, for virtual (and physical) infrastructure to enable efficient sharing/collaboration among various players in global economic development - government and public sector, private sector, academics, etc.

The virtual aspect of it is where I see the most potential - to create a framework which allows multiple global actors to create and share tools and information. USAID writes:

The GDC builds and improves on the existing development information architecture (websites, portals, blogs, chat rooms, conferences, gatherings, etc.) to create a comprehensive network that allows users to search for information, facilitate dialogue, and trade or exchange products and ideas.

USAID is playing an important leadership role here, which is great to see. But USAID seems to envision a strong role for major IT infrastructure, major IT players to create the GDC, as discussed at their November 27th event? We're hoping that the role of these major IT players (Microsoft, Google, Cisco, etc.) is to help provide leadership, and not pieces of infrastructure. We're more convinced that the GDC will succeed with an open-standards approach. An open-standards approach will lead to more robust and innovative efforts than an approach which is specific to certain platforms.

And an interesting example of an open-standards approach is the upcoming "Document Freedom Day" on March 26th. DFD seeks to raise awarness of, and adoption of, the ODF (Open Document Format), as a way to enhance access to and the flow of information across platforms. The siloed nature of online information in the development business (see separate web sites and services of the World Bank, Development Gateway, DfID, USAID, GTZ, ADB, IADB, PAHO....) is a prime example of the problem that ODF can help solve. The ODF site explains:

ODF(OpenDocument Format) an ISO standard created with the aim to provide an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. ODF is defined via an open and transparent process at OASIS and has been approved unanimously by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard in May 2006. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ODF reuses established standards like HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and Dublin Core.

Another example of valuable sharing and collaboration which will be enabled via open standards is the Grants Fire initiative, which Kurt Voelker blogged about here. From GoogleCode:

GrantsFire is a searchable database for philanthropic grants. It aggregates data from foundation web sites published in the hGrant format (http://hgrant.org/). The code is written using the Perl Catalyst framework.

What do you think? Interested to hear more about how the GDC can get up and going.

More info:

USAID Advisory Committee On Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) meeting on February 28th which will discuss the GDC

Sun's Simon Phipps blog post on ODF





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