Today I was called in to have a Teams meeting with a Norwegian government institution.
Being what I am, a person of standards, not implementations ;-). I am inclined to use free and open-source software that adheres to standards.
Logging into the meeting was easy peasy: select the camera (I have multiple); allow the browser/Teams URL to use my mic and camera; blur the background, before settling on a background that fit my personality.
Only to watch myself making funny faces for five minutes.
Great was my surprise when no faces showed up. The other participants could see me, but I was unable to see them.
Ruffling around for five minutes to get things working... we rescheduled.
There are some advantages to seeing each other when it comes to communication.
This is not a bug
What did happen?
Sound was working, my image was showing, I could turn on blur, and switch between a number of virtual locations.
When push came to shove, reality had a breakdown.
Immediate danger? No.
Long term? Yes.
We see this in nature. When one species dominates too aggressively, it does not win — it destabilises the ecosystem. It consumes too much of the common resources, removes diversity and disables resilience, and inevitably it collapses.
This is not philosophy; it is biology.
What just happened?
My setup worked:
- The browser followed the spec.
- The camera delivered a stream.
- The browser rendered it locally.
But somewhere in the black box, "Teams" decided I was not — part of the team — and immediately digitally marginalised and digitally erased me.
Not because I failed.
But because I was not conforming to an unwritten, proprietary expectation.
The Norwegian house implements Microsoft's vision.
NOT the standards and guidelines developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
A quick search, and a visit to the Microsoft Teams device test, confirmed my suspicion: Firefox does not work.
When our government tools don't implement standards, they undermine independent evolution, interoperability and long-term digital content survival.
And by this we are endangering our democratic resilience.
Whether citizens can access public information should not depend on which proprietary technology they happen to use. As long as it adheres to standards.
Working with web development in my early years, I recall the effort we faced with users coming from the dominant platform, MS Windows, and its bundled Internet Explorer.
The problem
When government bodies use software that do not implement standards/standard formats.
The cure
DO NOT spend taxpayer money on solutions that force the public to use a set of vendors, adhere to standards (DIN EN ISO 216, DIN 5008, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 45001, ISO 31000, ISO 8601, HTML/CSS, and WCAG 2.2.) they are there for our convinience and common good.