This is one of a series of reviews of the rival bids to host the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference 2008 (OOoCon).

Proposal

It should be easy to score top marks on a proposal – all you need to do is answer all the questions, fully, in the order they were asked. The Chinese team have done exactly that, supplying not just the Mandatory and Optional Information, but also the Supplementary Information too. This is a professional proposal, and gives confidence the team will deliver what they promise. As they say on their conference website: “Redflag2000 Spared no efforts to host 2008 OpenOffice.org Conference” Score: 5/5

Why Beijing?

The proposers emphasise the huge potential for OpenOffice.org in China, both from the number of developers and the potential end user population. They state that hosting OOoCon in China would give a strong boost to OpenOffice.org throughout South East Asia, although the team membership seems exclusively based in China. Score: 3/5

Koper Factor

OOoCon as we know it could not exist without commercial sponsorship, yet some of the most unpleasant and divisive episodes at OOoCons have been caused by issues arising from insensitive commercial sponsorship. The Chinese proposal has a big city, big business feel which means the team will have to work very hard and very carefully around these issues  (e.g. choosing the 60 people to receive travel subsidies). Score: 1/5

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:05 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.