OOoCon 2005 Community

Abstracts of Conference Papers - Community Stream

FOSS Participation in the Developing World

Danese Cooper - Open Source Diva, Intel Corporation

OpenOffice.org has been a huge boon to the so-called “Developing World”, places where technology penetration (even just electricity penetration) is relatively shallow and the hard-currency GDP is relatively low. Yet much of the Developing World has not yet understood that in the FOSS software commons, “Participation = Ownership”. Listen to a report on the current state of global participation in the FOSS ecosystem, garnered from first-hand observations by Danese Cooper, former Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun Microsystems and now Sr. Director of Open Source Strategy for Intel’s CSO Group.

Biography: Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Danese worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun's Chief Open Source Evangelist and founded Sun's Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Secretary & Treasurer. As of March 2005 Danese has joined Intel to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on Open Source and Licensing issues.

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Developing for OpenOffice.org

Martin Hollmichel - OpenOffice.org Project Lead of Tools, Porting and External Project, Sun Microsystems

The session will introduce on how to contribute to OpenOffice.org.
There are many different way on how to contribute to the project, we will look on different aspects:

code contributions,
macros, examples and other contributions
legal aspects
access to resources of the Projects (Website, Issue Tracker, etc)
CVS access and branches
channels of communication

The new OpenOffice.org development process differs in several aspects from usual OpenSource habits of other projects. The session will explain reasons for this differences and also discuss chances and difficulties of having an own development style. In detail we will have a look onto different roles of contributors, especially at the impact of the new development process to core-developer, QA folks and add-on-developers.
Target: New Developers

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Doing QA at OpenOffice.org

Joost Andrae - StarOffice program manager, Sun Microsystems

Overview

How can you help?
confirming issues
submitting issues
gather feedback from various sources (Users mailing list, discussion forums, etc.)
...
Child workspaces from QA perspective
Information about OpenOffice.org automation
About crash reporting and how it helps OpenOffice.org development
QA project statistics
Localization (l10n) team collaboration with QA

Target audience: Developers, Testers, Translators and People interested into OpenOffice.org QA

Biography: Born in 1965. In the late 80's I had my first experiences with RDBMS, SQL, software distribution, marketing and support on products running on DOS, OS/2 and Windows. Later I did Informix 4GL programming (at different companies) on SINIX and BSD UNIX. Since 1995 I'm working on the StarOffice product which later open sourced as OpenOffice.org. I started as a QA engineer doing QA & testing in Calc, Chart, Math and on Sun ONE Webtop. Later I've been doing QA & Coordination within StarOffice development at Sun Microsystems in Hamburg, Germany. My current position is StarOffice Program Manager as part of the StarOffice Operations team within StarOffice.

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Addons : From production to end-users

Laurent Godard - Directeur Technique, Nuxeo - Indesko

OOo scripting and addon production is just an other way to bring value to OOo by attracting new developpers.

OpenOffice.org brings a lot of possibilities regarding scripting.
With the 2.0 release, a lot of new languages are available and the addon installation is now available at end users level

It is now time to take benefits of this capabilities and organize ourselves to make addon production and use more and more easy. Building the scripting project through 3 main branches is a way to attract new developers in OOo world's and bring value to end users.
These 3 branches are :

Provide basic knowledge and help new commers start quickly
Collect the addons and check/verify/valid them
Provide a user friendly tool allowing end users to install these addons

I'll begin by a description of the scripting incubator project, the needs regarding contributors and the benefits that end-users can attend from. Then the attendees will discuss the following points:

How to build a development team covering the languages supported by OOo scripting (basic, java, python, javascript). Define the tools in each of them to make life easier to newcomers (pre-built wizards, introspection tools...)
The translation mechanism we should adopt and the relation with the native-lang communities
The validation of the submitted addons and the repository
The end-user tool to browse the repository
The other possibilities of such a deployment tools (templates, galleries ...)
...

Target audience: Addon developers (basic, python, java ...), translators – native-lang representative, End-users who want to deploy addons ...

Biography: The speaker is technical director of Indesko, building solutions for workflows and document management with OpenOffice.org for large companies. Involved in the OOo community for many years and author of various well know tools such as DicOOo, FontOOo, OOoWikipedia ..., the speaker is dedicated to macros writing in various language and known as a reference regarding OOo API use. He is also the co-author of the only french book dealing with OOo macros and API. He is now deeply involved in the scripting project.

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