Brief minutes: ODF Adoption Call Tuesday 2010-04-27

[Louis Suárez-Potts <Louis.Suarez-Potts@Oracle.com>]

Charles Schulz, Louis Suarez-Potts were the primary attendees. I briefed Charles on the ODF plugfest, focusing on the presentations and in particular on lPod, Appose, and RDF capabilities, as presented by Jos of KDE, and elaborated by Svante Schubert (Sun/Oracle), who also spoke on ODF Dom. Officeshots, presented by Michiel L., also captured much of the interest in both normalizing the ODF and its implementations and in expanding the format's functionality. In this regard, my own proclaimed interest in developing collaborative tools that can be embedded in the metadata of the ODF is relevant.

At the plugfest, Rob Weir was able to interview Svante for the first of what we hope is a series of germane interviews of ODF developers. The idea is to appeal to developers and explain the work being done so that they can do it, too. But this raises a logistical point, articulated by Bart: where to locate this work? ODF Toolkit is where I think it should be placed, as that project has the tools for this sort of developmental work. However, as Bart further stated in the plugfest, the fact that the current group working there is comprised of Sun/IBM is or could be off-putting to outsiders. 

I talked the situation over with Rob, and, a brief summary:

We do want new members but we do not want to unbalance by the too-rapid inclusion of new members the work being done. In short, we want really dedicated and competent developers, and we want to make it as easy for them to join the Union and participate in the work being done. 

It's a delicate point. The blunt response is to continue with the podcasts and also to develop material that helps new members. More refined, we need and must encourage developers from those groups working on the ODF and its implementations to consider post-1.2 options, and for that matter, to start fleshing out the skeletal ambitions already expressed here with code.