In mid-November, the open source/open standards advocacy group, Open Forum Europe (OFE), released an “Open Cloud Declaration,” which identifies ten principles to help policy makers, industry, and other stakeholders find “a global and open approach to Cloud technologies and solutions.”
It is not a coincidence, of course, that the Open Cloud Declaration was released during the same week that officials from the European Commission were meeting at a summit in Berlin to discuss data protection and cloud computing policy. These leaders (as well as policy makers in other countries, such as Brazil) are weighing their reactions in response to the ongoing revelations regarding data collection by the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA).