Which Contact and Event Formats for the UK Government?

Today, Paul Downey and I submitted two "challenge suggestions" to the UK Government's Standards Hub.

Now, we both work at the Cabinet Office, so I guess we have a head start in knowing about all this, as insiders .. but no-one will find the standards we're proposing to be in any way controversial.

We suggested that the UK Government should pick a standard for contact information exchange and calendar event information exchange. I won't bias the process by naming the obvious *ahem*vcard*cough* standards to *ahhh*icalendar*choo* at least give due consideration to, for these needs.

In true UK Government style (or the style of any Government I imagine), this process is done politely and at a slowww pace. Several packets of tea are consumed from the start to the end of the process.

To evidence this, there are already two accepted standards: paraphrasable as "Use UTF-8!" and "Use URLs!".

Baby steps, baby steps.

It's a long way to go from this to the Object Network contact and event formats, but once we've got something in the Standards Hub for contact and event, the next one to try for is: "A textual structured data encoding format with maps and lists, that is useful for moving data into and out of APIs".

That way we can then go on to suggest such an encoding of all the data available from our Government, which could include those contact and event types.

Not sure if we'd have to get HTTP - sorry, a hypermedia/data transfer protocol - in first, though.

Anyway, I've got plenty of time...