ODF plugfest in Orvieto
We have the pleasure to announce the second ODF plugfest, a two day ODF Interoperability Workshop which will take place in the Italian city of Orvieto on November 2nd and 3rd 2009. This event is organised by OpenDoc Society and a number of other stakeholders including the OASIS ODF TC, ODF OIC TC and ODF Adoption TC. The workshop is the second in a series of events that brings together implementors of OASIS OpenDocument Format/ISO 26300. The first plugfest was held in The Hague in June this year under the aegis of the Netherlands government.
The Orvieto plugfest will again provide plenty of opportunity to multilaterally test and discuss implementation issues of ODF with other application developers. The previous plugfest in The Hague was visited by over sixtyfive participants from forty different companies, open source projects and governments.
As was the case in The Hague, we will be inviting a number of representatives of governments as well to attend as observers. The availability of a neutral, stable format that facilitates the creation, exchange, management, and preservation of documents is important to modern government and civil administration. Working to broaden implementation interoperability is important for fulfilling the promise of freely-chosen and substitutable implementations, thereby assuring ODF viability and support into the foreseeable future. Governments have an important stake in an open and competitive software market place, both from a governing point of view as well as from a user point of view. ODF is clearly a game changing file format.
ODF support is nearly universal these days, as the common goal of a future-proof, application neutral format clearly benefits all. Of course there is a bigger trend in which the move to ODF fits - the growth of a more open and more fine-grained supply-side landscape, which in itself brings many new challenges besides the already complex convergence from a wide array of solution-specific formats. We have to deal with the history of decades, predating in many cases our own employment. This is why precompetitive collaboration like we expect to see at the plugfest is so important for our future.
The plugfest is meant for those people within your company or team that write and architect the code to handle the actual ODF. With many of the teams behind the competing ODF products on the market attending with their lead developers, technical management and community leaders, this will hopefully be another important milestone. The aim is to provide a low-level hands-on interoperability testing environment in which vendors and community members can fine tune the interoperability capabilities of their ODF implementations and make test scenario's, recommendations and create best practises for implementors. The ultimate goal is to achieve full seamless interoperability for the entire feature set(s) of ODF across all suppliers, platforms and supported technologies. We hope that you will send a delegation as well to participate.
If you have any questions, need assistance or just need more details, we will gladly help you out. Please contact Fabrice Mous (fabrice.mous at opendocsociety.org) or Michiel Leenaars (michiel.leenaars at opendocsociety.org), or one of the other members of the organising committee (*). You will receive a formal invitation with a full program soon. At your request we can send you a letter to assist with any visa applications. Meanwhile, you can already go to the plugfest website (http://plugtest.opendocsociety.org) to look at the results of the previous plugfest as well as the preliminary plans for the next one. We hope to see you in Orvieto.
Kind regards,
on behalf of OpenDoc Society
Bert Bakker
President OpenDoc Society
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(*) The organising committee for the second ODF plugfest currently consists of:
Jeremy Allison (Google)
Peter Amstein (Microsoft)
Zaheda Bhorat (Google)
Pim Bliek (Netherlands in Open Connection)
Basil Cousins (Open Forum Europe)
Roberto Galoppini (OpenOffice.org)
Dennis Hamilton
Bart Hanssens (Fedict) - chair ODF OIC TC
Don Harbison (IBM) - chair ODF Adoption TC
Peter Junge (Red Office)
Morten Kjaersgaard (OSL)
Michiel Leenaars (Opendoc Society)
Doug Mahugh (Microsoft)
Marino Marcich (ODF alliance)
Fabrice Mous (OpenDoc Society)
Sachiko Muto (Open Forum Europe)
Andrew Rist (Oracle)
Luis Suarez-Potts (SUN Microsystems)
Graham Taylor (Open Forum Europe)
Rob Weir (IBM) - chair ODF TC
Jan Wildeboer (Redhat)
Oliver-Rainer Wittmann (SUN Microsystems)
