Marketing Planet

Bloggings on marketing topics by project members - see disclaimer.
Last updated: July 04, 2009 11:00 AM GMT

July 03, 2009

GullFOSS :  New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300_m51) available

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m51 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.x has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m51" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/index.html

by Marcus Lange at July 03, 2009 08:46 AM GMT

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July 01, 2009

Italo Vignoli :  Numbers show trends and make news stories

Growing figures show trends. More Twitter followers means more good followers (and more bad followers). More business cards collected at a seminar means more good connections (and more bad connections).

More OpenOffice.org downloads means more OOo users (and more wasted downloads).

We at Associazione PLIO have been very punctual in announcing each and every download milestone reached by the Italian version of the suite since late 2006. In three years, the download rate has increased 40 times.

At the end of 2006 we were at 800.000 downloads per year, now we are at an average of 680.000 downloads per month (for those used to analysts numbers, the CAGR has been an astounding 240%).

OpenOffice.org users in Italy have been growing steadily. Of course, wasted downloads have been growing steadily as well.

Growing figures make news stories. Office suites are personal productivity tools, and personal productivity tools are commodities.

Commodities are measured by numbers, not by features (although OOo has some interesting features, such as the Hybrid PDF, a format which has not even scratched the surface of the market).

Users have a clear understanding of office suites, and most of them ask for improvements in key areas of personal productivity.

Users are interested in a growing community, because it means a larger ecosystem, more volunteers, more experts, more extensions, more and better resources, and so on.

Users do understand numbers, and are perfectly able to “read” between the lines of our announcements.

Of course, in the future they will be interested in a more sophisticated user interface and (maybe) in real time collaboration features. They know that OpenOffice.org will be there when they will need it.

by italovignoli at July 01, 2009 10:38 PM GMT

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John McCreesh :  OOo gets OCS

We’ll be using the OCS software to manage the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference this year (and any other  OpenOffice.org Conferences that want to use it). If you want a sneak preview of the site, look here

Grateful thanks to the Public Knowledge Project for a great piece of open-source software.

by John at July 01, 2009 08:47 PM GMT

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Christian Driga :  Manager’s choice: spend some time or spend money

All the software packages designed to do a certain task or job have differences in usage and looks. Buttons may be differently placed on the screen, workflow in some cases may differ from software to software, user interface will surely differ. But if they are mature applications they will certainly do the job they are supposed to do. All it takes is to learn how to use it.

When it comes to small packages, like for example a video player (Windows media player versus say Videolan) all things are quite easy as the main controls (Play, Stop, Rewind, etc.) are basically the same. So, using one or the other may be the same for a user. It becomes a bit more complicated when you try to manage advanced functions like playlists. There you will need a little more effort.

Same happens with larger software packages (for example an office suite like OpenOffice.org versus Microsoft Office suite) but at a different level of effort. Everybody who is used with one of them tends to say that the other is not doing the job. This is only because using an office suite implies more than 3 or 4 controls like in the case of video players.

An employee will, in most cases, argue that the office suite he or she is used to is easier and better than the alternative presented in a test-run before a migration. And managers, afraid of loosing money because of the possible slowdown in productivity due to software change will tend to listen to what employees have to say.

To state the obvious: being used to a certain software package does not mean it is easier to use or that it is better than the competition.

All the software packages have, aside from features, some bugs and lots of workarounds to avoid the problems in usage they have. By using them you learn those workarounds and in time you tend to ignore the bugs. But learning those workarounds requires some effort.

Migrating an organization from a software package to another means developing and using a strategy in minimizing this effort of transition and identifying and dealing with the problems either real or imaginary. At this step, in the OpenOffice.org office suite case consultants and community support may be of great help.

In times of economic downturn looking at software alternatives and taking the time to know them may make the difference between survival or bankruptcy, especially for small and medium enterprises.

Adoption of Free Open Source Software, like in our case the OpenOffice.org office suite instead of spending money on software licenses - can let you direct financial resources to other areas of your business. All you have to do is study a bit, know the new software and stay focused on your experience, not on what others say.

Today’s financial difficulties sent many businesses back to the drawing boards in an effort to rethink their future and find new resources. One of those boards is the “cutting costs board” and one of the solutions is rebuilding the company’s IT strategy on Free Open Source Software.

Managers: Back there when there was only one office suite, you had no choice but to learn it together with it’s problems. And don’t tell me it was easy to do it. But now there are alternatives (with their own bigger or smaller, real or fake problems), but certainly with important advantages like no licensing costs. Spend some time to get acquainted with them. It saves your business money.

Need more information on migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org? Take a look at this migration guide.

by cdriga at July 01, 2009 06:11 AM GMT

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June 30, 2009

GullFOSS :  New: OOo-DEV 3.1.1 Developer Snapshot (build OOO310_m14) available

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO310_m14 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.1.1 has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/OOO310_m14" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/index.html

by Marcus Lange at June 30, 2009 08:15 AM GMT

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June 29, 2009

GullFOSS :  Does OpenOffice.org 3.x have a general quality issue?

by Thorsten Ziehm at June 29, 2009 04:56 PM GMT

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GullFOSS :  The framework project, OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Windows 7

by Carsten Driesner at June 29, 2009 03:45 PM GMT

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June 27, 2009

OOo Marketeers :  Vote for us!

Do you like OpenOffice.org? Vote for us at SF Community Choice Awards: http://sf.net/community/cca09/vote/?f=433

by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at June 27, 2009 08:19 PM BST

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Louis Suarez-Potts :  COPU 2009: Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship

The below is the speech I will probably (you never know, and I tend to be parenthetical, digressive, and inordinately fond of extemporaneous speechifying) give at the China OSS Promotion Union’s (Copu) 2009 event to be held early next week in Beijing. Beijing Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Company, a strong supporter of and contributor to OpenOffice.org, has, via Copu, subsidized much of my trip and made possible what I believe will be very productive lectures, meetings, discussions. These include a lecture at Tsinghua University after the Copu speech, and quite probably other presentations and meetings with Chinese officials and groups interested in OpenOffice.org, Foss, and moving ahead fast.

(I always say and also believe that time rushes and that there is always some threat we must apprehend and deal with, be it particularly noxious FUD about the ODF, Foss, OOo, or, sometimes, me. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that I believe that this year is really quite crucial. Our competitors are not sitting idly by but building blocks of argument to persuade their existing and possibly even new clients of the virtues of their application and its features. Not sure if they talk about their format any longer. And meanwhile, the rampant distribution of “pirated” software continues, eroding not only those with a vested interest in the shrinkwrapped commodities, but also us, the Foss community, for a pirated work is not “free” and does not grant the four freedoms elemental to Foss but is only a bastard version of freeware, only more pernicious, as it comes with the snarky satisfaction for the user that he’s somehow pulled a fast one on the Man. Dream on: In what Illich would have called the Shadow Economy of piracy, the only ones taken for a ride here are those who have priced their freedoms cheap.)




Community Matters: Participation, Production, and Sponsorship
Abstract
I argue that participatory communities such as those making up successful Free- and Open-Source communities ultimately depend upon the intangible enthusiasm of its adherents, and that that enthusiasm cannot be fabricated but only enabled by a supportive environment. I conclude by advocating an on-the-ground regionalism giving flesh to Web relations in community development, as regionalism quickly brings to local groups the flexibility that accommodates to social, cultural, political differences around the world.

Basics: What makes a community?
What makes for a free- and open-source software community? I mean a “participatory community,” one more or less autonomous in operation, and one in which its members crucially, are engaged in working together. And what makes such a participatory community (“community,” for short) is, not at all obvious. Assembling a group of developers and other contributors to work on code licensed under a suitable Foss license, and linking the contributors using sophisticated tools for communication and production does not automatically produce a community. We all know this. The people may all be working on the same thing, and even be communicating their work amongst themselves, but they do not necessarily form a Foss community.
Ask the people involved how they feel about the project they are working on and how they feel about each other and unless they see themselves as part of a community, as sharing an identity, however conditioned by their work, they will likely answer with degrees of indifference. For these, working outside the logic of a community, the work is nothing more than a job, even though the code that is produced is open. License enables community but does not determine it; other factors are required.
Absent the spirit of community, it is difficult to engage the interests of talented developers outside of stakeholder companies and difficult as well to motivate those in the stakeholders to exceed themselves and do brilliant work. The result is that for all the investment poured into a project by the stakeholders, the project is always in danger of dying by attrition and a fatal lack of interest by developers and ultimately users.
One can cite any number of examples of such projects. Indeed, it is the fate of the vast majority of Foss efforts. Code is put out there―on SourceForge, say, but also on many other equally good sites―and then neglected. I've read statistics indicating that something in excess of 90 percent of all project code on SourceForge is not only never downloaded but the project URLs are not even visited. For all practical purposes, there are no communities associated with these dying projects. (A useful thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of new businesses also fail, and if not for exactly the sam reasons, at least for similar ones: no market / community to sustain the endeavor.)
But why even bother to try to form a community? Why not just hire developers or programmers? A Foss community gives more value than the sum of its parts, or stakeholders' interests. One can certainly work with free code without a community, but once that investment is withdrawn, there is every reason to suspect that the code, the project (if there even is one), will simply sink into oblivion. Perhaps that fate is sometimes tolerable and even desired. But if so, it's not one that most developers, project managers and executives would want. For it seems like a waste of resources and effort.
Foss “communities” are therefore important in that, at the very least, they limit the risk of wasted resources while also furthering a culture of development and distribution that exceeds any one stakeholder's expectations. Foss communities keep projects alive and growing, and they also do something that is enormously difficult: they give a project an identity that is far more than the sum of the stakeholder parts and is in fact and autonomous, in that it is not a predicate of any one stakeholder. To put it in business terms, successful Foss communities coin a brand identity whose value can be very great indeed.
For many of you this is probably obvious; for others, coming from business or government, Foss communities persist in being somewhat mysterious. Regardless of your experience, and even if it is obvious to you that Foss communities matter, the question that I try to answer here may not be: How can one constitute a (sustainable) community?
Constituting a community
I don't have the foolproof answer to the question I ended with above, How can one constitute a (Foss) community. A few years ago, at a conference in Brussels, I laid out the governance and some technical provisions needed to structure a working Foss community. But even if one has the ideal governance model and code architecture (an extraordinarily important point, is architecture and its impact on governance and community―and for all that it's been amazingly neglected), one is still not guaranteed a living, sustainable community. Laws, as it were, do not make a people; you still need the spirit that binds them into a common identity. Without that spirit, you have only the letter of the law, not the spirit, and you have very nearly nothing. But as I stated above, you need more than just spirit.
Political infrastructure is important
Nevertheless, one still needs the political infrastructure in order to constitute a Foss community that has any chance of sustaining itself. Mere spirit won't do it in the long run. This means that there must be in place the mechanisms by which any member of the project can communicate to another and freely discuss project matters with the expectation that discussions have effect and are not just politely ignored. As well, it is generally important, though I no longer think it requisite, that members have a sense of “ownership” in the community or at least in what they are doing. It's a feature more important in some areas than others, and as Foss continues to move away from its origins in the West and find welcome homes in Asia and Africa and India, that model becomes less essential.
All the same, this is just another way of saying that what global participatory communities need is a structure of governance that can accommodate difference within the community itself. Governance means here the guidelines by which authority is coordinated. Given the global nature of, especially, large Foss projects, or even smaller ones (the Internet knows now boundaries), flexibility is crucial―but so are guidelines that ensure impartiality and nullify arbitrariness.
The point then is to avoid the tiresome burdens of bureaucracy while exploiting some of its more useful characteristics, such as the principle that rules are only legitimate when they apply without passion or interest but with impartial disinterestedness. (I confess: that's not a likely situation, but one can imagine.) A structure as I've hinted above―minimal and with a focus on communication and implicitly on merit, as demagoguery ―approaches that goal. It allows for a hierarchical flexibility, with some projects being more horizontal than others, which, for reasons usually having to do with stakeholder preference and code architecture (again, code architecture determines so much in the political arrangement of Foss communities!), are more vertical. Either mode can result in a sustainable Foss community, and neither a radically horizontal structure, as can be seen generally with Linux, or a more vertical one, as in Eclipse, will make or break a Foss community, though I'm sure adherents of each mode would argue otherwise. (There is no strict methodology for Foss; there are only results, just as there is no strict, single way in which people body themselves as a nation.)
But what does make the difference is subtler. It can be:

• the personality and charisma of a key member (say, the founder, as in the case of Linux―and of course Apple, though it is not exactly an open source company)
• the perceived value of the commodity produced, either because of its utility or something else less obvious, and the attendant enthusiasm of endusers and non-developer contributors for the product and project, even if they do not actually code. OpenOffice.org presents itself as an exemplary case. For these, OpenOffice.org speaks to what they want both as an application and project that they can be part of―and affect.
• extraneous considerations, such as the political and social context of the project, or elements such as the file format. OpenOffice.org can be used here again; and of course, that's because I'm partial to it.
• An Us vs. Them sense that can attach itself to the project. For many Foss projects, this is actually too easy a way to form a community. It's easy to attack large, hegemonic companies and to proclaim oneself the freedom-bearing saviour. It's much harder, however, to actually create something that does what is needed and that satisfies not just the Geeks among us but also the knowledge workers and others who, well, use the proprietary software on a daily basis because they must, as part of their job. (Incidentally, these workers don't care about the drama of freedom playing out on their desktops. They care about doing their work fast and painlessly.) At some point the rhetoric of defiance must meet the fact of ability, else there is only hot rhetoric or vaporware
• A supportive environment. This can take the shape of government support or cultural or educational or business support and enthusiasm. It can be subtle: recall that nearly all contemporary successful Foss projects saw their origins in universities, which gave the talented student the intellectual room and support to develop not only his ideas but to pass them on to others.

  • More broadly, It is vital to have an environment that nurtures young projects and, most importantly, gives developers the sense that what they and their companies may do with Foss is neither criminal nor foolish but at the least a sensible strategy. (It should be noted that this provision need not imply a background of wealth. I am not suggesting that the individual developer be supported by the state or by doing contract work that pays well. Those scenarios are possible for rather few polities. I am suggesting that Foss be considered as a business and production strategy on par with others.)

Finally, and this is a necessity for any participatory community, the community must be able to identify itself. That is, it must be able to enunciate what it is about: what its goals are or its focus of work or whatever that can be shared and held as one's own by all who wish to join it.There are no doubt other anchors to the formation of a Foss participatory community. (Students of political science can also probably identify elements from Max Weber and Benedict Anderson, to name but two. In many ways, a community is a community is a community, regardless of the actual nature of its work.)Authorizing community
Few projects, large or small, have so captivated the political and social imagination of so many in so many nations as OpenOffice.org. It has done so on the basis of its default file format, which it initiated, the OpenDocument Format, and because it holds open to every kind of contributor, not just developers, the possibility of going beyond the limits on imagination and productive activity imposed by proprietary software.
OpenOffice.org rolls into a single, vast community many of the points sketched above and it is indeed used by many from South Africa to Venezuela as a vehicle for freedom. (Foss, of course, and by extension, OpenOffice.org cannot be identified with a single political stance. That doesn't stop others from trying to do just that.)
But the emergence of OpenOffice.org in the Chinese field presents some interesting challenges, not least of which is the establishment of a participatory community or communities focused on OpenOffice.org (or, for that matter on other projects).
It's always a challenge to set up such a community―I hope I've made that clear. But the challenge here lies as much in the coordination with the international groups, as with the identification and articulation of authority.
The first problem―language--is well known and if not easily resolved, at least it's pretty clear what has to be done. The second problem is more difficult to resolve. Authority issues have always and will always shadow Foss projects. Actually, this is a good thing. It is another way of saying that one of the freedoms of Foss lies in the radical distribution of authority, the effect being that if a developer or group can claim the authority (and persuade their peers of it) to set up rival projects―forks--then they are free to do so. The distribution of autonomy is a central characteristic of Foss, regardless of governance structure. That is to say, more or less autonomous shadow projects―forks―go with the territory. All Foss projects can be forked and most have been; OpenOffice.org itself has countless small forks, and most are simply non-threatening.
They are non-threatening because they lack the resources of the primary project. The majority of developers don't want to change without compelling reasons, and stakeholders are not about to change either, without some compulsion. Each large project has its own momentum.
But that is not so when the project is small or when the social and cultural context do not have a history of autonomous participatory communities but do have a long history of strong communities enabled and sustained in part by an outside authority which has spoken them into being and therefore partly constituted them. In this case, persuading people that they can well, just go ahead and do it, doesn't work and is, as they say, a nonstarter. Under whose authority, they might ask?
Saying that everyone should be adopt a do-it-yourself approach and use his own authority gets us nowhere, and as a former scholar of US culture and its international effects, it's hardly a strategy I'd like to endorse. Besides, there are better solutions: one works within the cultural and social contexts.
I'd like then to propose guidelines for establishing local and regional communities that also communicate with their international organizations.

Proposal: Guidelines for establishing Foss communities
Elements:

• Authority comes with what you do. The international organization can testify to your work and identify and honor what you have done via public documents and statements. But this is only the recognition of work done, not work that could be done.

        Local communities share the global identity. Their identity is modulated by context but the basic message, the essential identity of the project is and must be the same. Otherwise, one has effectively fragmented the project and diluted it.        Communication with the international organization is essential. Communication can be via wiki, via forums, mail list, IRC, etc. The important point is to constantly remind others in the world not only of what you are doing here but of the context of your work. Otherwise, people will forget, as everyone is always more interested in his own work neighborhood than in some one else's. It is an obligation we all share to represent to others what we are doing in the larger global community.
        Foss licenses give freedom. But by the same token they complicate the field and introduce the serpent into the garden, as it were, of competition: for developer attention, if nothing else, but quite often for product market share. Squelching competing forks does not work, it only causes bad feelings and weakens the primary community. A sustainable community succeeds, however, not by coercion but by the appeal of its work, identity and members. Underpinning this appeal is the trust that both local contributors and the international community put in the legitimacy of the license. It's what enables the project and what I have elsewhere called the horizonless collaboration of Foss. Anything that challenges that legitimacy challenges the project itself.
These guidelines will not necessarily make for sustainable, living Foss communities. You will still need the other, more intangible elements, which can be summarized as an enthusiasm for the project and its mission that transcends any particular commercial claim. Otherwise, it's just a form of marketing, and that does not work to create a community. Enthusiasm, on the other hand, comes from those within the project and draws others in.

The Importance of Regionalism
I have been advocating that regional and local groups be formed to further the larger goals of the international project―and vice versa. The advantage of regional groups or organizations―local branches of the international―is that each local context has its own style of communication and community formation. Not all rely on the Internet and all use it and the social Web differently. Regional groups accommodate to local differences and promote the fast creation of networks that bring in new developers, new contributors, new users.
But no user, no developer will participate in an atmosphere of fear, doubt, uncertainty and in the absence of strong and usable support. Rhetoric is nice but actions are nicer. It's not about politics; it's about making things.

by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at June 27, 2009 04:24 AM BST

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June 25, 2009

Benjamin Horst :  SourceForge Community Choice Awards

Louis passes along the message that OpenOffice.org has been chosen as a finalist for the 2009 Community Choice Awards in the category of Best Project for Government.

Click the image below to visit the site and vote for OpenOffice.org! And be sure to check out all the other great projects while you’re there.

by Benjamin Horst at June 25, 2009 03:07 AM GMT

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June 21, 2009

OOo Marketeers :  OpenOffice.org 3.1 released

OpenOffice.org 3.1 has just been released! Get more information on the new features at http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/

by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at June 21, 2009 08:56 PM BST

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OOo Marketeers :  Open Source Meeting in Munich

If you are living near Munich, don't miss this event and meet your mentor: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User:Floeff/OpenSourceUnplugged

by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at June 21, 2009 08:55 PM BST

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June 18, 2009

GullFOSS :  Prototyping Towards a New OOo User Interface

Project Renaissance has entered the prototyping phase this week.

The phase will take six weeks. Andre Fischer and Bernd Eilers have joined the Renaissance team for this time to develop the prototypes. We have started to build a Java based prototyping framework this week.

The prototypes will be made available through the prototyping home page as soon as they become available. So stay tuned!

Best regards

Frank

by frankl at June 18, 2009 07:28 PM GMT

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John McCreesh :  Ten million

The download counter at OpenOffice.org is showing that downloads of OpenOffice.org from the OpenOffice.org download page have passed the ten million mark (the counter was reset when OpenOffice,org 3.1 was launched on 7th May).

That’s a lot of happy users!

by John at June 18, 2009 07:04 AM GMT

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June 17, 2009

Louis Suarez-Potts :  Eccles cake in Shoreditch

Just had an Eccles cake at St. John Bakery and Wine and it was extraordinary. I had never had one before, and that was surely my loss. Actually, the restaurant itself is fairly extraordinary.

by oulipo (noreply@blogger.com) at June 17, 2009 08:11 PM BST

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June 16, 2009

OOo Marketeers :  OpenOffice.org in Education: Using OpenOffice.org for Entrepreneurial Training

When OpenOffice.org usage in education is discussed, it is often thought of in the context of using it for courses in office management, introductory computing courses enrolled by both IT and non-IT majors, primary and K-12 technology courses and perhaps even english composition courses. However, there are many other educational programs where OpenOffice.org is ideal, some of which are often overlooked.

One such educational program is also one that has been garnering a lot of attention among many state economic development leaders in recent years. Entrepreneurial training and resource programs for many states has been one of its primary economic development initiatives when trying to address rising unemployment, outsourcing by companies of productive works previously performed by salaried employees, moving of manufacturing facilities to emerging economies oversees and creating economic growth in rural areas. In the United States, for example, small businesses now account for between 60 and 80 percent of all net new job creations and employ about half of all workers.1

So while newspapers and local television news organizations splash headlines touting the occasional successes of large companies locating to an area and providing jobs, often with the caveat of reduced or the elimination of property and income taxes for those companies to even consider the relocation, small businesses without said benefits quietly, without fanfare, continue to be founded by local entrepreneurs that create sustainable economic growth and significant local job creation.

So you may be asking, "How does OpenOffice.org fit into all of this?" I feel I can best explain this by citing my own personal example while I was the director of a small business development center at a community college. These centers, often referred to as Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) in most states, are in part federally and/or state funded and often located at university and college campuses throughout the United States. They are established with the mission of providing one-on-one confidential counseling, training and educational resources to existing small businesses and entrepreneurs.

One of my first uses of OpenOffice.org for instructional purposes was when I was involved in a project providing instruction for local, small farmers in need of receiving computer skills training to assist them with better managing their farm operation records. These farmers came from diverse backgrounds, and raised a variety of livestock, as well as fruits and vegetables for various wholesale markets. Many of these farmers were carrying on with this occupation in tradition; many of them were the third or fourth generation of farmers within their families.

But there was one thing they all had in common; they all had been affected by what has become known as the "digital divide". Many of these farmers had little or no computer training. Most of them were still using a single paper ledger to manage their revenues and expenses. Or worse, their receipts and expenses were kept in a shoebox underneath the seat of their pickup trucks.

Moreover, they lived in areas where dial-up access was still the primary gateway to the Internet. Yet, despite their limited knowledge of operating a computer and using software to manage their records, the United States Department of Agriculture and local banks were increasingly providing electronic record and loan submissions as the only means to submit such documentation.

With the cooperative efforts of my Center, the local agricultural cooperative extension service office and the state cooperative extension service office at the local land-grant university, computer courses began to be offered to these small, limited resource farmers to help them utilize the personal computer as their primary record keeping and documentation submission tool. In the end, over 100 farmers received this training in my service area alone. These farmers started with the basics, such as developing proficient keyboarding skills and using the operating system. They then progressed to using word processors and spreadsheets so that they could become proficient enough to create documents such as business plans, balance sheets, profit and loss statements and cash flow statements.

And what was the primary word processor and spreadsheet application used for this training? It was OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc, as well as NeoOffice when instruction was provided in the Mac lab. There were many reasons for choosing OpenOffice.org, but three I found to be most important.

First, OpenOffice.org provided an alternative to proprietary office productivity suites such as Microsoft Office and AppleWorks, which were also used during the training. By having the availability of an alternative suite of applications for providing instruction, it focused the farmers on developing the conceptual skills of operating a computer and creating key documents, rather than focusing on learning a specific software application through rote memory. This proved to be an effective way of getting the farmers to realize there were multiple ways of approaching a task, as well reinforcing confidence in their ability to operate a computer and create documents in varying environments or when technologies change.

Second, the generous licensing terms of OpenOffice.org allowed copies of the software to be distributed to the farmers for personal use without incurring licensing fees. Upon completion of the series of courses, these small, limited resource farmers would be eligible to receive a personal computer donated by local businesses and agencies that were being taken out of deployment and replaced for newer models. The donated computers would be refurbished by training program administrators and volunteers to operational condition and installed with a legally licensed operating system and software. By making copies of OpenOffice.org available to the farmers, they would receive a full-featured office productivity suite capable of creating the various business documents they need to produce while saving both the donations program and the farmers money from having to purchase copies of proprietary office productivity suites.

Third, the use of OpenOffice.org added value to the instruction the training partnership provided, as well as to the local economy. The small farmers participating in the computer training program were excited to learn that they could receive a copy of OpenOffice.org on a CD at no cost to them. It inspired the farmers that had computers at home to load the software there and learn as much as they could outside of class. It also provided added value to the Center's training program and services; providing low-cost instructional solutions that instilled to those receiving the training that the Center and its partners were making an investment in their future and success.

Moreover, by freeing the farmers from having to utilize scarce financial resources to pay licensing fees for software necessary to help them better manage their farm operations and become more profitable, those dollars instead were, in part, used to buy other products or services provided in their local community. This scenario often leads to adding additional value to the local economy and creates additional jobs. Typically, 45% of money spent at a locally owned business or service provider remains in the local economy, whereas as little as 14% or less remains in the local economy when spent with businesses and service providers that are headquartered outside a local area.2

So the adoption of OpenOffice.org, when included in a broader inventory of instructional tools and resources, can have substantial benefits to learners, teachers and educational institutions alike. And when utilized in often overlooked educational and community support programs like that of entrepreneurial training, the possibilities for even greater positive effects can be too numerous to list.

References

1 United States Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy, Frequently Asked Questions, 2008. Link: http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf

2 "The Economics of Buying Local", Denise Blaha, New Hampshire Carbon Challenge. Link: http://carbonchallenge.sr.unh.edu/newsletter/economics_buying_local.jsp

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Gabriel Gurley is an eight-year educator in higher education, whose roles have included instructor, administrator and IT specialist. He is the author of the award-winning "A Conceptual Guide to OpenOffice.org 3" (ISBN 978-0-9778991-6-6), an instructional guide and related resources written specially for use in academia. He is currently a Computer Technical Specialist for a liberal arts program in the State University of New York system and is a contributor to the Documentation (Conceptual Guides page) and Education projects with OpenOffice.org.

by ggurley (noreply@blogger.com) at June 16, 2009 10:41 PM BST

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June 15, 2009

OOo Marketeers :  New Features in 3.1 as video!

See the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.1 in a convenient video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4ARctdsAtM - thanks to Carl and Rosana for their great production!

by floeff (noreply@blogger.com) at June 15, 2009 06:48 PM BST

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June 12, 2009

GullFOSS :  New: OOo-DEV 3.1.1 Developer Snapshot (build OOO310_m13) available

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev OOO310_m13 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.1.1 has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/OOO310_m13" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/index.html

by Marcus Lange at June 12, 2009 02:29 PM GMT

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June 11, 2009

GullFOSS :  New: OOo-DEV 3.x Developer Snapshot (build DEV300_m50) available

Developer Snapshot build OOo-Dev DEV300_m50 which installs as OOo-DEV 3.x has been uploaded to the mirror network.

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org's bug tracking system IssueTracker.

Please use the following link
http://download.openoffice.org/next

Packages are also available from extended mirror sites ( listed with an [E] ) from the ".../extended/developer/DEV300_m50" directory:
http://distribution.openoffice.org/mirrors/#extmirrors

MD5 checksums:
http://download.openoffice.org/next/md5sums/index.html

by Marcus Lange at June 11, 2009 07:05 AM GMT

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Benjamin Horst :  Project Renaissance Designs

OpenOffice.org’s Project Renaissance continues to progress, with the announcement last week in Elizabeth Matthis’ post UI Design Proposals Wrap Up and a Look Forward that “17 proposals were submitted and reviewed by our brilliant and creative community members. They contain a total of 145 user interface design mockups. (Wow!) There were 80 comments or questions added by OOo-community reviewers.”

She highlights some of the proposals and includes several design mockups in the post to illustrate the participation levels already achieved.

What’s Next? The Renaissance team is determining which ideas (note: mixing and matching will happen here!) appear to implement the design directives* most successfully. Those that do will be used to create a handful of (wire frame) prototypes. Later, the concepts the Renaissance team is working on will be the basis for mid-fidelity prototypes that will be validated in tests: We need to confirm that the UI changes will be real improvements and will be well-accepted before we roll them out to our whole user base.

The team will publish further information as they go, so stay tuned! The excitement isn’t over yet.

by Benjamin Horst at June 11, 2009 02:09 AM GMT

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