Keeping up with the rapid increase in governments embracing open standards and specifically OpenDocument is assisted greatly by the OpenDocument Fellowship’s annotated set of links relevant to decisions by government bodies around the world to adopt office software supporting the OpenDocument XML standard.

The Fellowship’s news page is a good source of the latest information and links to relevant news items and commentary. Here are a few of the many items listed on that page.

Internationally, the list of governments adopting OpenDocument is too long to summarize here. In the U.S., following Massachusett’s lead, at least four other states now have legislation pending that would require an open-standard document format for government records: Minnesota, California, Texas, and Oregon. Numerous other state agencies and departments (especially libraries and education) are moving to OpenOffice.org, a cross-platform office suite supporting OpenDocument.

The ODF Alliance, composed of governments, academic institutions, non-government organizations and industry, celebrates its first year of educating policymakers, IT administrators and the public on the benefits and opportunities of the OpenDocument Format. Their press release is here (PDF).

Rob Weir recently started a series of blog posts on The Case for a Single Document Format; Part I and Part II of a planned 3- or 4-part series have been published.

The fourth annual OASIS Symposium for Open standards will be held 15-17 April 2007 in San Diego, California. An OpenDocument Workshop: Adoption, Accessibility, Programmability and Future is scheduled for the morning of 18 April at the OASIS Symposium. “The members of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC will be hosting a special half day workshop dedicated to topics important to understanding the ODF standard and its technology.”