The Cabinet Office has confirmed that the consultation on Open Standards which was due to close next week has now been extended by a month after the facilitator of a round table discussion was discovered to have been directly advising Microsoft on the Open Standards consultation. The roundtable events have been held to bring opinions together and as a complementary source of input to the consultation, alongside the email, post and online methods for offering opinions on the government’s proposals.
According to the Cabinet Office, Dr Andrew Hopkirk facilitated a 4 April 2012 roundtable around “Competition and European Interaction”. Hopkirk, described as “a respected advocate for ‘openness and interoperability of systems, of people, processes and information technologies'”, was engaged by the Cabinet Office as a facilitator on a pro bono basis.