ODF in Action proposal

[Louis Suarez-Potts <louis@openoffice.org>]

The original idea I had was to appeal to endusers but appealing to  
developers to make the things that would subsequently appeal to  
endusers is equally interesting. The urgency and point is obvious:  
MSFT is issuing (so they  say and after so many delays, who can doubt  
them? :-) Office 2007, and I'd like to spoil that party.

What better way than to demo both ODF's attributes in action and its  
flexibility?

So, a contest, hosted by OASIS, which has the infrastructure.

Characteristics of the contest, which would end shortly *before*  
Office 97 launches, with winners announced around that time or at the  
OASIS conference in San Diego in April:

* Host this on OASIS, with members of the TC and ODF Alliance  
announcing it on their company/project pages
* Appeal to developers to create implementations expressing files in  
ODF. No license restrictions.
* Segregate entries by category. We select the categories. I'd think  
that categories should be fairly broad and cover not only how data is  
managed but also sector.
* Possibly use a populist method of ranking entries à la eBay: one  
would have to log on to a site and be identified by email alias and  
undergo some tedious ritual of identification but once registered, be  
able to vote on entries.
* Prize money: As license could be proprietary and as people could  
thus make money off this and as winners would be earning a fair  
amount of advertisement that would be otherwise really expensive to  
obtain, prize money could be modest, and it could also be expressed  
by sponsoring companies' products.

Other points: we can also ask the ODF Alliance companies to see if  
they would be interested in helping to sponsor this contest. Getting  
students, et al. to work on this would also be be useful. This is not  
exactly open source (sigh) but it is about engaging a community of  
developers to work on cool things and it will be all the cooler the  
more it implicitly and tacitly makes of 2007 not MS's Vista but ours.

Ciao
Louis

smime.p7s