Abstracts of Conference Papers - Thursday

In this session we will examine the OOo project as it is today, including governance, relations with other projects, contributions, etc., and looks at where we are heading.

The Japanese native language project is one of the biggest and most active community among native lang projects, and should have some political influences in OOo community and opensource community.

Unlike other languages which use alphabets, processing Japanese is extremely difficult for computer; one reason is we use over 10,000 characters, and this induces many problems including political ones. Nevertheless, our active field has become very vast, publishing books, voluntary user support, dealing with SourceCast problems esp. CJK specific ones, events, bug fixing/reporting, localization and porting etc.

Introducing results/efforts of Japanese community in one and half years from OOoCon2003 as case study.

This talk sets out to explain the reasons and rational behind the ooo-build project: why it is we work this way, why it has been the base for most Linux distributions, why it is attractive to people wanting to develop features for OO.o, and how we can make OO.o more attractive.

We will also walk us through some light-hearted annotated histories of interaction with people outside of Sun on various issues, hopefully to illuminate ways of more efficient communication and encouragement of external developers.

Finally a look at the various areas for improvement, for better collaboration with main-line OO.o development, improved release cycle integration, and some of the emphasis and interesting new pieces in ooo-build.

The Marketing Project is one of the ways in which "non-technical" people can help the OpenOffice.org Community "create as a community the leading international office suite".

This interactive session will explore the Marketing Project's work on creating the first Marketing Strategy and Plan to achieve "desktop domination" for the OpenOffice.org Office Suite by 2010. At the end of the session, attendees should:

• have a good understanding of the emerging strategy
• feel excited at being part of this amazing community
• understand the strategy making process and know how to take part in it.

The workshop is aimed at the entire community, not just Marketing professionals. The Marketing Project needs YOU!

OpenOffice.org is distributed through OEMs, CDROM distributors and downloaded from the Internet. CDROM distributors have the opportunity to play an increasing role by reaching those individuals and organisations that do not have a reliable and fast connection to the Internet.

This workshop will explore ways for OpenOffice.org CDROM distributors to market and distribute OpenOffice.org effectively. Topics include:

• Identity and branding.
• What goes on the CDROM.
• Promotion and working with the Marketing Project.
• Processes and methodology including burning or copying of CDROMs, labelling, packaging and delivery.
• I have sent a CDROM, what now?
• How to contribute to OpenOffice.org.

The workshop is to be accompanied by a static display of sample CDROMs, packaging and marketing material used by OpenOffice.org CDROM distributors.

Biography: Jacqueline McNally is Lead of the Marketing Project and Webmistress. She enjoys responding to the OpenOffice.org webmaster mail to show that there are real people at the end of email messages and within the OpenOffice.org community.

Jacqueline uses her research skills to connect to many activities within the OpenOffice.org community and sees one of her roles as guiding others from wherever they have arrived at the community.

Open source software (OSS) is a "disruptive technology" as unique as the printing press was when Guttenberg invented it. Christian Einfeldt is a simple end user of OSS who became so excited about OSS that he has teamed with director Paul Donahue to produce a feature-length documentary film, called "The Digital Tipping Point" to explore the cultural effects of the global shift to this disruptive technology.

Christian's talk will include clips from film interviews of open source newsmakers such as the Mayor of Munich, Germany and the Education Minister of Extremadura, Spain.

The theme of the film, and Christian's talk, is that OSS is a "disruptive technology" which could change the computer software industry as dramatically as Honda's disruptive Supercub motorcycle up-ended the North American motorcycle market, as discussed by Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen in his seminal work, The Innovator's Dilemma.

The OSS community is the most distinguishing "disruptive" feature of OSS. The dynamic nature of the OSS community and the economically sustainable businesses deploying OSS will preserve the "open" quality of the Internet and drive the creativity produced in the "creative commons" of cyberspace.

Biography: Christian Einfeldt is a simple end user who deploys OOo as his primary office productivity suite both in his law practice and his emerging non-profit advocacy group, called the Open Source Banyan Tree in San Francisco California.

This would be a presentation that is primarily intended at the Native-Lang members. I shall explain why the Native-Lang category was created, how it was at the beginning, how I came to be nominated by Guy Capra and what was going on at that time. I'll the speak about the expansion of the Native-Lang Confederation, how we start with 5 or 7 communities and how we went up to now, with more than 40 projects. I'll describe the major issues we've been facing up to now, and what went wrong, what got better.

Then there will be a general overview on how the Native-Lang Confederation interacts with the other projects inside OpenOffice.org and even outside our community.

As a final point I'll be speaking about where I think the Native-Lang Confederation goes, why, and how to drive it one step further.

As a conclusion I will provide a short update on what will be going on inside the NLC at the time of the conference and I will thank all the members of the Native-lang Confederation.

Biography: I was born and live in Paris. I'm 25 years old and initially I didn't have any interest in computers or software except for games. After some painful law studies, I founded a small US-based company in the mobile internet services that ceased any business activity after the dot-com burst.

I then decided to complete my academic cursus and entered a business school in Paris. Around that time I decided to join OpenOffice.org, having used StarOffice 5.2 for a long time.

I was first involved in the Marketing and the FR project of OpenOffice.org; then I took the charge of Lead of the Native-Lang Category together with Louis Suarez-Potts and became heavily involved in OpenOffice.org. These days I work at Novell local marketing unit in Paris as part of my 4th year academic cursus.