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OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2008)

5th-7th November 2008
Beijing, China


Call for Papers

Please note the Call for Papers closed on 18th July

The OpenOffice.org Community invites potential speakers to submit proposals for papers for OOoCon 2008. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about OpenOffice.org - we want to hear from you. Please note the Conference language is English.

A unique occasion

OOoCon 2008 will see the biggest concentration of OOo developers ever assembled in one location on this planet. For this reason, we particularly welcome proposals from developers with information to share with fellow developers, from how to get started with simple extensions, through to the deep, dirty, and downright technical aspects of hacking the OpenOffice.org codebase.

Papers are also welcomed on any topic of interest to the Community: to the thousands of people who have joined one of our Projects and design, develop, maintain, translate, test, document, support, promote, or in any other way help us bring OpenOffice.org's products and services to the world. As this is the first OOoCon to be held in Asia, we encourage local communities to submit papers for a special feature on local success stories.

How to submit a Proposal

Your proposal (abstract) must be submitted in line with the Key Dates.

Key Dates

  • 18th July: deadline for regular submissions for consideration by the OOoCon Jury. Your paper will be considered on its merits against all the other proposals.
  • 30th July: we will let you know if your proposal has been accepted. If you have applied for a travel bursary, we will tell you if we have been able to grant you one.
  • The Conference Programme will be published on 4th August with all accepted proposals. Registration will open at this point.

Conference Topics

We welcome contributions on any of the following topics ... but feel free to add your own:

Development

  • The source and how to work with it
  • The roadmap beyond 3.0
  • Tools for development
  • Integration and localization
  • QA, UI, and development processes
  • Packaging for distribution
  • Porting and platform specifics
  • System integration with OpenOffice.org (ODF, UNO, API, extensions)
  • Macros and Extensions

OpenDocument Format

  • ODF State of the art
  • ODF Future Directions
  • ODF interoperability

Community

  • Celebrating and promoting OpenOffice.org 3.0
  • Commercializing, integrating, and supporting OpenOffice.org
  • Migration methodology
  • Marketing OpenOffice - the product and the Community
  • Branding and artwork
  • Funding the project, defining the product, and extending it

Native Languages

  • More than translation: building local language communities
  • Tools and techniques for localisations
  • The OpenOffice.org Release Process

Case Studies

  • OpenOffice.org in Government and Public Administrations
  • OpenOffice.org in the private sector (SME - Small to Medium-sized Enterprise)
  • Building a successful business around OpenOffice.org (training, migration, support, development of extensions, technical authors...)

Types of Session

A presentation is a general discussion of some topic, including (but not limited to) the software, the community, relationships with other software or communities, and political or philosophical issues. Presentations should be limited to 50 minutes (including questions and answers).

A workshop is a "hands-on labs." session, in which the presenter takes the audience step-by-step through a task, or provides hands-on tuition for audience in a classroom format. Presenters may request extended workshop sessions up to half a day in duration for complex tasks (e.g. how to set up a build environment).

A BoF (Birds of a Feather meeting) is an informal gathering of people in a particular group, or interested in a specific topic. Examples include the members of a native-language group, the marketing project, documentation writers, or Apple Mac porters.

A panel discussion involves a group of people (usually 3 or 4) led by a moderator. The participants make opening and closing statements on the topic, may discuss the topic among themselves, and may answer questions from the audience (usually submitted in advance).

Travel Bursaries

As this is the first time OOoCon has been held outside Europe, we are will be offering bursaries to speakers to help defray the costs of attending. A bursary will consist of free room-only accomodation in a conference hotel, plus a lump sum contribution of Euro 500 towards travel expenses.

Each request will be considered on the basis of both merit and need, so if you need a busary to enable you to present your paper, please give as much information as possible to help us evaluate your request.

Presentation Materials

An OpenOffice.org Impress template recommended for use for the conference presentations will be published around 1st August 2008. All speakers are required to file a copy of their presentations with the Conference organisers in advance. These presentations will be filed on the Conference website.

Please note that your session may be streamed as a live broadcast and may be recorded and made available for download from the Conference website.

We look forward to receiving your proposals.