Ah,the relief. I can miss the silly season this year. I can turn off the TV, turn off the talk radio, turn the newspaper straight to the sports page, and altogether ignore the last month of the campaign.
Why? Because I’m attending the OpenOffice.org 2008 Conference in Beijing, November 5th-7th. Since I’ll miss election day, I’m submitting an absentee ballot, and in fact I’ve just filled it out. I predict a great increase in personal productivity from being able to sit out the remainder of the minute-by-minute saturation campaign coverage.
This will be my third OOoCon. After Barcelona last year and Lyon in 2006, the organizers this year have a tough act to follow. But from what I can see, this year is shaping up to be the “best ever”, with open ceremonies at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (former residence of Madame Mao) and a conference sessions at Peking University.
Although the focus of the conference is OpenOffice.org, the program, the developers, the translators, promoters and users, there is also a natural overlapping interest in OpenDocument Format (ODF). Because of this, OOoCon typically is also the largest ODF conference of the year, at least based on number of ODF-related sessions.
In particular I’ll draw your attention to the following ODF-related sessions:
- Interoperability — expectations, promises, problems and solutions (Florian Reuter)
- OpenOffice.org and the ODF Ecosystem (Dieter Loeschky)
- Panel Discussion — ODF Interoperability Perspectives (with representatives from IBM, Sun, Google, Novell, FEDICT, moderated by Aslam Rafee of DST)
- ODF@WWW — An ODF Wiki (Kay Ramme)
- OOo and ODF Accessibility (Malte Timermann)
- The New ODF 1.2 Metadata Framework and its Support in OpenOffice.org 3 (Svante Schubert)
- ODFDOM -the new open sourced multi-tiered API for ISO OpenDocument Format (Svante Schubert)
- ODF Accessibility: Perspectives Past & Future (Don Harbison)
- Introduction to SMIL and Implementation in Lotus Symphony (Yan Peng Guo /IBM)
- Transforming and OWL Ontology to an OpenOffice Document Template (Massoud Toussi)
- Improving ODF Applications by sharing ODF tests (Svante Schubert)
- Enabling ODF for Social Collaboration with Composite Applications and Mashups (Santosh Kumar)
- ODFDOM Workshop — using the new opensourced multi-tiered API for ODF (Svante Schubert)
- Digital Signatures: A Global Challenge (Joachim Linger)
Full details are in the conference program. My pride in seeing so many good ODF-related sessions is slightly offset by the the sadness that interest in ODF has grown so much that I can not possibly attend all of these sessions.
I hope to see many old and new friends in Beijing. This is a great opportunity to continue spreading the message of open source and open standards around the globe.
The momentum behind ODF is wonderful. Thanks for the pointers to the talks; I’ll try to see as much of them as I can at OOoCon.
I am almost sorry that I won’t be talking about Translate.org.za & Itaapy’s ODF-XLIFF project (for those new to translation: XLIFF is a translation interchange format that roughly occupies the position of ODF in the world of translation formats).
Both organizations have implemented ODF-XLIFF converters (we’re working together to specify how ODF should be represented in XLIFF). Both converters are works in progress, but should already be useful to anyone wishing to do translations of ODF documents.
Since I’ll lack an ODF soapbox at OOoCon, I’ll have to invite everyone reading this post to read my most recent blog post.
Can you pick up some open-source in Beijing ?
I’m looking forward (with some trepidation) to the first time I need to diagnose and resolve a problem in Java written in Chinese.
Practicing with open-source would be useful so that I am ready for the inevitable day when I have to do it for a paying customer using IBM commercial software.