A public consultation about access to European documents A public consultation at the European Commission were open standards supporters have to react before July 31, 2007 The European Commission has considered opening a public consultation concerning the review of the rules on access to documents (Regulation 1049/2001), regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents. The Green Paper is the starting point for this consultation, which will allow any interested person, individual citizen, non governmental organisation, association, economic operator, public authority or any other organisation to have a say on this issue. The consultation is on http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/revision/index_en.htm and asks for contributions by email. It opened on 18 Avril and closes on 31 July 2007, but I heard of it only on July 15, 2007. We don't have much time to react. As of today (July 16, 2007), only very few contributions have been sumitted, (only 22 divided as public sector (7), private sector (4), non-governmental organisation (5), citizens contributions (6), other organisations (0)). This could only be due to a lack of advertising on such an important subject. Both the content and the form of the publication are important. Today, due to lack of time, I cannot react on the content, that needs more time to study, and I suggest we al contribute. I propose that our contributions go as follow for example, and 1. on the process, ask for a longer time to react, until for example December 31 2007 or even longer, outside of the always calm summer period. 2. on the form, ask for the use of open standards, as defined by the European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment Services (Version 1.0, 2004, page 9) for all information, be in documents, video, sounds … published on the websites of the European Commission, 3. on neutrality, related to the previous point on open standards, ask for the exclusive mention of software products based on functional usages and absolutely no mention of commercial brands that could be understood as advertising or support for such commercial brands by the European Commission. Indeed, as we can read on today the consultation website , the process explicitely mentions proprietary softwares, like Microsoft Word and Outlook, as reported in the sentence //If you are not a Microsoft Word user, you can download a PDF document and copy the text of your contribution into that file. // and this is unacceptable as it favor one company (or some) in particular. Please copy the above 3 comments for example as well as others for this public consultation, and send them as required to the email address mentioned on http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/revision/index_en.htm and send this email also as copy (aka in cc.) to euconsultation [ at ] openstandards [ dot ] eu ... http://www.openstandards.eu/campaignecwebsites --