Back home for a long weekend (today is a UK bank holiday) after spending most of last week in London on business. I managed to fit in an IRC chat one evening with some of my fellow judges of the OpenOffice.org Community Innovation Programme (CIP). Sun Microsystems offered multi-million dollar prize money earlier in the year to the open-source projects it is most closely aligned with.

Evaluating the entries for the OpenOffice.org portion has proved challenging. The entries have covered all aspects of community activity, from heavy hacking through to translating, documenting… For each entry we have had to take expert opinion, and then rate the entries on a consistent basis using the published judging criteria.

I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to do this in the middle of the holiday season, and in my case, in the build up to the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference However, spreadsheets are going backwards and forwards, and light is appearing at the end of the judging tunnel.

As someone once said, if you have something that needs doing, give it to a busy person so if you want to see what else this busy person has been up to, there’s a new version of the Conference Programme online and available for download.

Readers with long memories may remember that I managed to lodge an e-Petition with the UK Prime Minister’s Office urging the UK Government to sign up to the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation. The original posting is here.

The petition clocked up 212 votes, and today I received the following email as the official Government response:

The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here: http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page16572

Prime Minister’s Office

This ends this experiment in Web 2.0 e-Government

One of the pleasures of attending the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference is catching up with old friends. I always make a point of having a chat with Zaheda, one of the founders of the OpenOffice.org community, now with Google, but still keeping a keen interest in OpenOffice.org.

Zaheda is doing a Conference session The OOo Global Community which should be a ‘must see’ - note to community members - expect to be asked for your stories over the next few weeks! Conference attendees love to celebrate the new achievements of the OpenOffice.org software - let’s also celebrate the people who make it happen.

On a related topic, Phil Whitehouse has an interesting piece on building communities. There’s a growing feeling in OpenOffice.org that some of the structures could do with a good spring clean, starting with the Community Council. Maybe we need to spend some time on this in the bars in Beijing

As you may be aware, an event eagerly anticipated around the world is taking place in Beijing this year. I mean of course the OpenOffice.org Annual International Conference, which will take place between 5th-7th November this year. We are now in a period of frantic activity for the Conference organisers. As usual, the bulk of the work falls on the local organising team, but the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project has the overall responsibility for organising the Conference Programme: collecting proposals from speakers, creating a Jury to select the best papers, and using the selected papers to create a balanced and attractive programme.

This process has been running for the past few weeks, which is one reason why my blogs have been few and far between. However, I am pleased to say that the Conference Programme and all the session Abstracts are now online:

• if you are still dithering about attending, please browse the site and see what you will miss if you don’t attend
• if you have decided to attend, please register now, and use the Programme to decide how you will spend your time in Beijing!

The countdown to the real big event of 2008 in Beijing is now underway

SourceForge is the largest repository of open-source projects on the planet. The results are in from their 2008 Community Choice Awards:

SourceForge.net is proud to present the winners from our 2008 Community Choice Awards.

Best Project »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org
Best Project for the Enterprise »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org
Best Project for Educators »	OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org

See here for the reasons why.

Thanks to all the people who voted for us, to SourceForge for being there, and to the diamond sponsor of this competition.

I wonder if they teach this essential piece of user support information on Microsoft Professional Support courses?

I promise you, this is one problem users of OpenOffice.org will never have to worry about

One rendition of Wirth’s law states that “software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”. Judge for yourself with some interesting benchmarks for OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word.

I’m not a benchmarking expert. As an end user, my only comment on this is that I run OOo (currently 3.0beta2) on a daily basis on a diminitive Asus EEE PC under Linux and the performance is absolutely fine.

However, don’t take my word for it - download OpenOffice.org and try it yourself. If you like it, keep it for free. And suggest to Microsoft they let you do the same with MS-Office