The Open Standards Board

In the Open Standards Principles we said that we’d set up an Open Standards Board to help us to decide which open standards to use in government IT.

Now that we’ve published the first 8 challenges on the Standards Hub, it’s time to set up the Board and start making those decisions.

The Board will focus on making sure that our open standards meet users’ needs and achieve a level playing field for open source and proprietary software. They will consider the ideas and proposals that users put forward through the Hub and will advise us on which open standards to implement.

We’ll be sharing their discussions and recommendations through the Standards Hub.

Who’s on the Board and why?

We ran an advertisement early in 2012 for volunteers outside government to join the Board. At that stage we weren’t clear on the exact role of the Board so we waited until the Open Standards Principles were set before we made a decision on who should be invited to join.

The volunteers we’ve selected have fantastic track records in using, implementing and developing open standards. They will join me and other experts who we’ve invited to contribute.

The full line up is:

• Liam Maxwell, Government Digital Service (Chair)
• John Atherton, Surevine
• Adam Cooper, Bolton University
• Matthew Dovey, Joint Information Systems Committee
• Paul Downey, Government Digital Service
• Lee Edwards, London Borough of Redbridge
• Tim Kelsey, NHS Commissioning Board
• John Sheridan, The National Archives
• Jeni Tennison, Open Data Institute
• Chris Ulliott, CESG

You can find out more about each of the Board members on the Standards Hub. We’re waiting to hear back from one other applicant and will update the Standards Hub if there are any changes.

How you can get involved

We want how we select our open standards to be a completely transparent process and we’re keen to draw in ideas from all of our users. I encourage you to register on the Standards Hub and to get involved in the debate.

When you register, you’ll notice that we ask you to tick a box if you’d be willing to get involved more directly – for example as a volunteer through working groups or panels set up to investigate detailed proposals.

Anyone who registers and ticks this box could be invited to join us in groups such as these, particularly if you’ve put forward ideas through the Hub that we need to investigate further.

The work of these groups will be transparent too so it’s entirely up to you if you want to accept an invitation to work with us in this way. If not, you can continue providing your thoughts or follow the discussion through the Standards Hub.

If you’d like to apply to be a volunteer member of the Open Standards Board in the future, we’ll be keeping the recruitment process open so you can send in your application at any time. If a vacancy becomes available and you have a particular area of expertise that we’re missing, we’ll be in touch.

We very much look forward to getting the debate started so we can set the right open standards that deliver better, more connected digital services.