Woke up to thick haar – I can’t believe this weather travelled all the way from Edinburgh just to make me feel at home. Fortunately the sun broke through during the morning to give a bright sunny noon. Market day in Orvieto – everywhere felt a lot busier – there even seemed to be a flurry of late tourists.

Another full day at the OpenOffice.org ‘Cento Milioni’ Conference , from 9am to 7pm followed by the famous Native Language Confederation (NLC) Party – tickets a very non-threatening 10 Euro. The NLC is arguably OpenOffice.org’s greatest success, with mostly volunteer teams around the world translating the software and documentation nd providing the full range of support in the world’s major languages. I spent the morning listening to the documentation and translation teams sharing success stories and best practice, and grumbling about software support for their activities. There’s a clear opportunity for some open-source developers to fill gaps here … and earn the gratitude of hundreds of people around the world!

The afternoon was spent hopping between tracks. One major conference theme has been User Experience (UX) work. The OpenOffice.org Renaissance team had provoked a storm in the blogosphere earlier in the year. I enjoyed watching the team trying to cajole an OOoCon audience into a participative session showing how UX goes about it business. It was interesting to compare this with the work IBM have done on Lotus Symphony, their commercial product derived from OpenOffice.org.

It was also great to hear from the hugely successful NLC operation in Brazil, where OpenOffice.org (or BrOffice,org as it’s known for trademark reasons) is in danger of becoming the de-facto choice, with three major corporate deployments each with ‘cnto milioni’ desktop deployments.

So it was only right to round off the day at the NLC Party, which was a hugely convivial event. Alas, the caterers had failed to estimate the appetites of software developers – or the necessity for strict portion control at buffets attended by said population leading to long queues and people threatening to ring Dominos for additional pizzas. Maybe this is the ‘slow food’ for which Umbria is famous

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