Got on to a longish (and extended over some days) mail thread with LSP from OO.o about having a regional level mini conference for OO.o. What brought this about was the general perception that [1] regional level development and contribution to the core is not happening and [2] contribution to the core has a high entry barrier. The current plans are to hold a one and a half day (un)conference at Pune (need to see wherefrom one can get the venue) with the must include list of participants:
- Members of the Indic NLP
- CDAC
- TDIL
- Red Hat
- Novell
- Ubuntu
- IBM
- Sun Microsystems
- NRCFOSS-AUKBC
Keeping the number of participants to around 20-25 should lead to discussions which can come out with action points and timelines. The tentative agenda is:
- Get a development and contribution process in the open (rather than maintaining in-house forks)i e, making transparent code review/acceptance procedures for OOo. And also in the same breath, encouraging core development. Synthesizing and clarifying the procedures for localization and core development and at the same time emphasizing core development along side QA
- Elaborate the contribution to OO.o process for Indic NLP and other volunteer contributions
- Setting realistic goals for the Indic NLP along side putting it squarely in the middle for coordination with the various government
bodies who are stake holders in standard committee - Call for Volunteers
- Dictionaries, Thesaurus and other necessary tools to make a complete OO.o in local language
- Forming sustainable teams that are funded and enabled by government & corporate & NGO agencies
So if you know an agency or a body which might be interested in: [i] Hosting [ii] Sponsoring [iii] Taking care of logistics for the above event, please do get in touch with me (sankarshan at openoffice dot org) with the Subject Line OO.o Regional MiniConf Jan 2007