OOoCon2007... over but not forgotten
The OooCon2007 is done and over now. Looking back on the week in Barcelona, I have to say that it was a pretty amazing time. Barcelona is an amazing city, and the University where the conference was hosted is absolutely stunning.
We arrived in Barcelona around noon on Tuesday. The first discussions got underway later in the afternoon, starting with the Native Language Confederation meeting. This was a lively discussion that covered a lot of the topics near and dear to the hearts of the people involved with translations. The first day ended with the NLC party that was held in the University entry hall.
Day 1 started with a lively Keynote address from Louis Suárez-Potts and focused on where OpenOffice.org is heading with version 3.0. After the opening comments, breakfast was served outside. It was a great chance to meet people and associate faces with the names we see in the mailing lists and projects.
The next presentation was given by Hu Cai Yong from RedFlag Chinese 2000. It was really interesting to listen to. The presentation itself was given in Chinese with a running English translation. The focus was on how software developed by Western countries does not serve the cultural needs and differences for Asia.
From there, the group split into the various parallel sessions.
A few sessions I attended that I found quite interesting:
- Across the Great Wall – a story about Peter Junge, how he came to live in China and what he does for RedFlag.
- Integrating OpenOffice.org with Web Content Management Systems – a presentation about eZ publish, and open source CMS.
- The price is high! Is it too high? - an interesting discussion about the OpenOffice.org API.
Day 2 started out with the Community Council Question and Answer session. This drew a lot of attention, and a lot of really good questions were asked. There was definitely not enough time scheduled for this session. From there, everyone again split into the various smaller meetings.
A couple sessions that I found interesting:
OpenOffice.org & Alfresco – the integration of OpenOffice.org and Alfresco. Especially nice was the new Alfresco menu extension for OpenOffice.org that allows you to use OpenOffice.org to access your documents in the Alfresco CMS.
Why are you doing this to me?!? - a very interesting presentation from Maurizio Berti covering various migration issues he has encountered when migrating companies to OpenOffice.org, and the innovative solutions they came up with.
Day 3 was another very busy day, and they got started around 8:00. One session that stuck in my mind was Office OpenXML: a technical approach for OOo given by Hubert Figuiere. This presentation looked at the technical details of how OOXML support can and is being supported in OpenOffice.org. It's not an easy task.
The Doc.next - The Future of the Documentation Project session was well attended. We covered the current state of the OpenOffice.org documentation, and then looked to the future... what we can do to keep the momentum going and fix some of the problems we have with the existing documentation. A lot of new ideas are being tried out such as moving the documentation to the OpenOffice.org Wiki. You can see an example of that with the Administration Guide.
The conference concluded with a roundtable chaired by Louis where various key OpenOffice.org community members and representatives from Sun, Novell, Google, RedFlag, IBM, and so on had a chance to answer some pointed questions about their views on topics around OpenOffice.org. It was a nice conclusion to the conference.
Was it all worth attending? Definitely. The information presented in the various info sessions was really valuable. What really stood out though was the time between the info sessions where people mingled in various parts of the University just talking about their own projects and ways they work with OpenOffice.org. It was a chance for people from unrelated projects to meet up, find out what each is working, and form new contacts... and even offer new ideas and suggestions. I am sure that more than 2 or 3 people discovered that they were working on the same ideas from different angles.
If you were not able to attend this year, you can catch up a little on what went on by watching the videos but.... it's not as good as actually being there. I hope to be there next year, and to meet up with even more community members.