[Libreoffice] report from ODF Plugfest Gouda

[Cor Nouws]

Hi all,

report from first day (=yesterday)
(In the train now on my way for the second one)

Two tracks
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This ODF plugfest is organised roughly in two tracks:
- international, where the ODF supporting office programs exchange;
- national, where Dutch and Belgium firms that have software for ODF 
document creation (e.g. for public administrations) show their work and 
do tests via Officeshots, where the ODF output can be compared in 
LibreOffice, OpenOffice.org, MsOffice, Calligra, Abiword, GoogelDocs, ..


The presentation about ODF in LibreOffice.
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The presentation went pretty well.
Though I had not spent enough time to be able to show all details of the 
features involved, most was pretty clear.
Of course I got great support van die lieve meneer Fridirch.
(I'll add the presentation to the wiki later today)

About the workflow from idea for a new feature, to implementing to 
proposal for the OASIS TC, there was the remark that it can be important 
that ideas are shared with developers in other projects. Which IMO is 
true, but I expect that in reality that is already practice since people 
lurk on each others dev lists?
Well, that will not work for all projects of course.


Tests via Officeshorts
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Though I've not been there all the time, the results that I saw were all 
very positive for LibreOffice.


ODF specs modular?
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There was some discussion on the way ODF is organised and the possible 
benefits from a modular specification - which would make it easier 
/faster to decide on new versions of certain modules.
 From what I understood, IBM is looking at that/or working on a proposal.


Contacts about TDF/LibreOffice.
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I had the opportunity to explain to some interested people the structure 
of TDF. members, membership committee, board of directors, advisory 
board, ESC, and other teams, such as UX, QA, l10n, documentation etc.

Also there was interest in how it works to get ones needs (for features) 
on the agenda of the developers. If there is any voting involved, who 
sets priorities, ...
So that was a good opportunity to explain the way we work: do the coding 
yourself (and you get lots of great support for that) or make sure that 
other developers are interested in it, which can be done in several 
ways, of which sponsoring and support contracts are two important ones.

I spoke with someone from a company that uses LibreOffice in a 
document-production server.
First they were glad with the significant improved stability compared 
with the old OpenOffice.org (which confirms reports that I got from a 
Dutch business partner).
In the past that firm did look at the possibilities to contribute to the 
(old) project, but decided that is was too complicated. SO I explained 
that it's relatively easy now, and that there is a great hackers 
community with people able and willing to help.
So that contact will be continued.

Cheers,

-- 
  - Cor
  - http://nl.libreoffice.org