In order to change the paradigm and shift the culture in government, Quinn said, "each one of us has got to take that first step and actually demonstrate that we can make the changes, and then make some of that stuff happen."

Quinn suggested that Engelbach reach out to the speakers at the event, which included officials from IBM and Sun as well as the founder of the recently incorporated Open Document Foundation, a nonprofit focused on improving and enabling ODF.

The event speakers were hard-pressed to offer examples of ODF implementations outside of the state of Massachusetts. Quinn also mentioned that the Massachusetts IT Division got a lift when the Library of Congress stated that documents should be saved in open formats.

Reached by telephone in the U.K., Ian Lynch, a founding member of the Open Document Fellowship and a consultant at The Learning Machine Ltd. in Tamworth, England, said it's "relatively early days" for ODF, which OASIS standardized only in May.

Lynch said that users of the latest versions of the OpenOffice.org suite and Sun's StarOffice will likely be saving files in ODF 1,0, since it's the default file format in those applications, even though they also have mechanisms for saving documents in other formats.