I had a brief conversation with Erwin yesterday about whether the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference (OOoCon) was now getting so big that we should contract it out to professional event organisers. Having been to many such organised events in my day job, I’m convinced that OpenOffice.org should keep to recipe of local teams organising OOoCon for as long as we possibly can.

Today’s opening day in Barcelona convinced me this is right. The venue is amazing - an ancient university, with the opening sessions held in a cathedral-like baroque fantasy lecture room. Kiberpipa - the conference media team - have set up their high-tech open-source wizardry in a splendid library, with walls full of ancient tomes. They have done an excellent job of streaming the last two conferences live over the web, but alas they met their match this time. While the university has wall-to-wall wifi, wifi’s not fast enough for video. Kiberpipa made valiant attempts to unroll great drums of ethernet cabling, but unfortunately you can’t stream video over extended lengths of cable either. So apologies to those hoping to watch the events live over the web - the sessions are being recorded and will be posted, but not in real time.

We don’t set a theme for OOoCons, but in this first day a clear theme emerged. Occasionally I still hear the tired old taunt from lazy journalists that open-source projects, including OpenOffice.org, are derivative rather than innovative. Since drawing level with MS-Office with OpenOffice.org 2, we have consistently delivered innovations which the market wants, ahead of MS-Office - like an ISO standard file format.

From today’s presentations, this is only the beginning. My high points of the day were the presentations from RedFlag 2000, whose cultural perspective from Beijing is revolutionising the way they look at office software. In the west we worry about making our software look too different from what people are used to. With 20 million new PCs in China every year, there are hundreds of millions of people coming completely afresh to office software. By looking at their needs afresh, untainted by western legacy design considerations, they are coming up with some fascinating alternative ‘look and feels’ for OpenOffice.org. I hope to post some demos of this here.

Another high point for any contributor to OpenOffice.org must be the vote of thanks received from Everex following their Wal*Mart PC - we put out a press release about it, and the broadcast is here.

A group of us managed to drag ourselves away at about 7.30pm, guided by a young lady (who shall remain nameless but works for Sun here :-)) who took us to a tapas restaurant in the middle of the tourist area. Maybe we should have become suspicious when she made an excuse and left without eating anything. The food was ok and there was plenty of it - an interesting mixture mostly of air dried meats and sea foods - but with only one glass of beer apiece we were startled by a bill of well over 300 euro for the eight of us. For 45 euro a head I’d expect a juicy steak and a nice rich red wine rather than lots of plates of nibbles.

I headed off back to the hotel and had a slice of cheesecake and a coffee in the Starbucks round the corner. Cheap eats from now on.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.