Member Introduction : Ben Langhinrichs

[Gary Edwards <gary.edwards@OpenDocument.us>]

Hi all,

It's my pleasure to introduce to the TC a new member, Ben Langhinrichs. Many of you are no doubt familiar with Ben's Blog and the long tail of very insightful comments he has posted while racing the full length the sprawling ODF - OOXML front line of controversy.  I don't think he's missed a single flash point.  For sure the steady clarity of his arguments and the measured, knowledgeable reasoning he brings to these issues has been a godsend for a public that continues to be lashed and whipsawed with often confused and misleading rhetoric.

Ben has been a programmer for twenty five years, using a variety of languages and platforms.  He has spent the past decade launching and running Genii Software, an ISV selling extensions to Lotus Notes/Domino and coexistence solutions between Notes/Domino and other technologies. Genii is a pure product company, and does not do consulting. The extensions and coexistence solutions that Ben writes mainly pertain to the Notes proprietary rich text format, and conversions between that and other formats; especially HTML/XHTML, and more recently, ODF.

I'm confident that Ben's experience with internal and external representations of data will be useful to the technical committee, especially with his particular focus on transformations, conversions and document fidelity.  No doubt his experience and desire to contribute will help our efforts to enhance ODF's ability to handle diverse data, especially in round-trip conversions from various formats;  a class of issues important to many on the TC.  Especially those involved with ODF Plugins and the migration to ODF problem set :)

On behalf of the TC, welcome Ben. 

~ge~

--
Gary Edwards
The OpenDocument Foundation, Inc.
Redwood City, CA USA 94063
(650) 365-0899
(650) 888-2268 c.
gary.edwards@OpenDocument.us
http://OpendocumentFoundation.us
http://OpenStack.blogspot.com