Eric Kriss - Open Formats

Open Formats

In early 2005, Eric Kriss, as Romney's Secretary of Administration and Finance, was the first government official in the United States to highlight the importance of open formats and public records: "It is an overriding imperative of the American democratic system that we cannot have our public documents locked up in some kind of proprietary format, perhaps unreadable in the future, or subject to a proprietary system license that restricts access."

At a September 16, 2005 meeting with the Mass Technology Leadership Council Kriss raised state sovereignty as the overriding issue surrounding public records. While supporting the principle of private intellectual property rights, he said sovereignty trumped any private company's attempt to control the state's public records through claims of intellectual property.

Subsequently, in September 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to formally endorse OpenDocument formats for its public records and, at the same time, reject proprietary formats such those used in Microsoft's Office software suite.