Thursday September 28, 2006

I met a Participation Age guru at Sun's Global Technology Leadership Conference in Bangalore, India this summer. He is the Honorable Mr. Justice Yatindra Singh of the Allahabad High Court.

Justice Singh is an active advocate of openness and participation at a court which itself has a history of advocacy and participation. The Allahabad High Court was the first court in the world to interpret the "person clause" to include women when it enrolled Cornelia Sorabji as its first female legal practitioner on August 24, 1921.

More recently, due to the influence of Justice Singh, the court has continued its aggressive support of openness by adopting open source technologies and embracing new technologies to broaden the impact of the court. Specifically, all court IT infrastructure is now required to be built from open source components and the court has adopted the Open Document Format as its official document standard. In addition, the court publishes an RSS feed to announce all major judgments of the court, perhaps the first use of this technology by a court. Now that is openness and participation!

The Justice is an expert on open source licensing and cyber law and is the author of Cyber Laws, published in 2005. He was invited speaker at Sun's GTLC and spoke about open source from a legal and end-user perspective. While he was very positive about Sun's OpenOffice effort, he felt more attention should be paid to Solaris ease of use and to raising awareness of our open source efforts to people outside of the technology sector.

Justice Singh blogs at A Judge's World.