Conference Day 3 – was it only three days?
September 22nd, 2007
Another late night, another early start for Conference, this time so as not to miss the native-language projects. Their sessions provide fascinating insights into what motivates people into devoting their time, energy, and abilities into working for the OpenOffice.org community, or in persuading their public administrations to become involved. I look forward in particular to see the outcome of the academic studies in Galicia which are measuring the impact of free/open-source software adoption on their economy. With so much so-called ‘research’ in the IT profession being funded by commercial companies, it will be great to have academically-respectable studies instead.
I love when the unexpected happens at Conference. One fascinating session was triggered when a speaker failed to turn up to deliver a presentation on Quality Assurance (QA). It turned out that a significant part of the OpenOffice.org QA comunity was sitting there in the room, so we had an impromptu discussion session instead, covering some key issues such as “who decides that a new release is fit for purpose?”. At the end, Pavel turned to me and said “We should do more of these next year”. Point taken.
The Conference finished with the usual panel of sponsors, plus yours truly as the only volunteer rep. Now, I don’t want to play down the importance of the Conference sponsors – OOoCon simply wouldn’t happen in its present format without their donations. But I’d much rather have a closing session that showcased the whole OpenOffice.org community to the world. I hope I don’t look too grumpy on the video when it appears on the Conference media site.
My grump factor increased considerably when I was buttonholed straight after the session by a member of the audience who demanded that OpenOffice.org get its act together and get into the big (US) corporations. I have no problem with WalMart, Exxon, General Motors etc using OpenOffice.org software to save themselves licence fees and boost their dividends to stockholders. But that isn’t what keeps me on the net late into the night working on OpenOffice.org. I’m pretty certain it isn’t the reason why our native-language teams out in the field put up with pretty desperate conditions to support digitally endangered languages. I’m quite happy to leave big corporations to Microsoft – in most cases I have come across, their IT departments and Microsoft deserve each other.