Heterogeneous information and communication technology (ICT) devices can exchange information only if they adhere to common technical standards. Increasingly, governments are developing policies specifying the use of more "open" ICT standards within federal or local agencies. Academic analyses of open standards usually address economic and technical concerns. But technological design is also political. Technologies both embody values and, once developed, have political onsequences. This paper employs democratic theory as a method of political and ethical inquiry into the political implications of openness in ICT standards development and adoption. Our account describes four ways in which standards can raise political implications: standards can have implications for other democratic processes; standards can affect the broader social conditions relevant to democracy; the content and material implications of standards can themselves constitute substantive political issues; and lastly, the internal processes of standards-setting can be viewed politically. We then describe various conceptions of openness in standards and describe a maximal definition of openness as a conceptual pole that anchors one end of the spectrum of potential standards policy options. We develop some guidelines as to the contexts in which democratic values require a greater degree of openness in both the substance of technical standards and their development, and
consider these imperatives in the particular context of government documents.