This session would continue a tradition that began with the first OOoCon and provide an overview of the work done in the OpenOffice.org Project over the last year and an examination of where we anticipate going. The discussion will touch both on the product and project: What OpenOffice.org 2.0.x (released on last year's anniversary) has accomplished and how the Project has evolved over the last year, in part because of the product's accomplishments. The evolution has made the Project more open to developers and other contributors; it has also brought into focus our market position—and the responsibilities associated with it. I conclude this paper by examining the options available to us and suggesting a strategic plan for the coming years.

This session will be about how the Native-Language projects drive the OpenOffice.org momentum, and how much the present and future success of the project depends on them. It will present the Native-Lang Confederation, explains what it does, what are the activities of the Native-Language Projects, and how they contribute on the local scale to the success of Open Source and social/economical development.An update on the Native-Language Confederation will also be made.

The Marketing Project believes the next twelve months are crucial to the development of OpenOffice.org. The product is better then ever. Microsoft is losing the sympathy of several of its key markets, and OpenOffice.org is the only realistic alternative. 2006 is UNESCO's year of Mother Languages in Cyberspace, and OpenOffice.org is uniquely poised to exploit the demand to use software in mother languages. Public administrations and commercial organizations are starting to realise the value locked in their office documents, and OpenOffice.org is the market leader in supporting ISO 26300 file formats.

For all these reasons and more, OpenOffice.org is the answer - we know why we use it; we need to get the message out to those who don't. At the same time, the Community needs to increase its membership: developers, translators,advocates, end user support. We know why we volunteer to work in the Community - we need to get that message out too.

The Marketing Project is responding to this with a campaign 'why.openoffice.org'. This session will explain the drivers behind the campaign and explain what every conference delegate needs to know to go home and answer the question:“Why OpenOffice.org?” why should people in target markets like governments, SMEs, universities, schools, etc. implement OpenOffice.org? why should developers rise to the challenge of working on the code? why should people volunteer to work in the Community?

Since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 the office suite gets more and more public attention all over the world. People should recognize as well the product as the community not only by it's name but also by the visual impression they get.

If they get the same impression wherever they see any reference to OpenOffice.org they should recognize it without reading the characters – they should recognize it even if there aren't any characters at all.

This “Visual Identity” is important for spreading public awareness for OpenOffice.org and therefore we should try to include not only the official OOo logo but specific bugs and symbols wherever we want to promote OpenOffice.org: in marketing materials, on web pages, documentations and so on.

The main bug is the pair of stylized gulls from our logo (in right relative size and position), some other graphical elements are used to refer to OpenOffice.org 2:

• the blue-to-white gradient from the splash screen
• the “wire gulls” (from the splash screen, too)
• the colors of the program icons and the icons themselves
• the S-curve from the icons.

The Art Project created proposals for an updated logo, program icons and additional bugs to be used as official branding elements for OpenOffice.org after the release of OpenOffice.org 3.

This artwork will be presented to the community and hopefully will be discussed among the different projects involved in this topic: Art, Marketing, Website, Documentation and as many Native Language Projects as possible.

This session will provide an overview about the functionality improvements and new features implemented by Sun Microsystems and other contributors for the next OpenOffice.org releases.

Building OpenOffice.org is a lot of fun! This session will guide you to places, where the real fun happens. I'll talk about experiences I gained in the past building OpenOffice.org on several operating systems and I'll compare build experience on different operating systems (GNU/Linux on x86 and x86_64, Mac OS X, Windows and Solaris) and hardware configurations.

OpenOffice.org is free and should stay free (gratis). However, given the ambition of the project, we need to chart ways in which to monetize what is free, the product. We can charge for ancillary things, and this BOF would discuss options available to us. They include featuring ads in the downloads, getting support from interested companies, providing for-fee support (either directly or indirectly), licensing documentation for 3rd-party support, training, certification, ads, and so on. In short, a wide variety of options are available to us and these will help sustain our ambition.

The localization activities of OpenOffice.org in India (done largely by BharateeyaOO.o group and other Open Source L10N contributers) is on the verge of creating a revolution as far as adoption of OpenOffice.org goes in Indian Masses. Initialy started with an intention to provide a BIPK (Basic Information Processing Kit) to general masses in Indian Languages, the ministry bundled OpenOffice.org along with other popular Open Source Softwares and released them as Free Cds which could be obtained by any person by sending a simple mail. The languages that these Cds were released were in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. About 200,000 Cds have already been distributed apart from making them available on the government website ( http://www.ildc.in ). The Ministry has promised that the Cds will be released in all 22 scheduled Indian Languages and OpenOffice.org has cemented its place in the BIPK list.

The popularity of the efforts and the quality of softwares is now making some of the local OEMs (HCL, HP and Zenith) to consider pre-bundling OpenOffice.org and other softwares. This helps them in reducing costs as well as providing localized versions of the softwares. A National Resource Centre for FOSS has been setup at Chennai India ( http://www.nrcfoss.org.in/ ). One of the mandates of NRCFOSS is to build a localized Debian based distro for Indian Government and Educational Sector. OpenOffice.org forms a major part of this software especially in the Government Sector. BharateeyaOO.o ( http://www.cdacbangalore.in/bharateeyaoo ) is helping NRCFOSS in integrating OpenOffice.org and certain other specific OOo macros into their installation set. Currently OpenOffice.org is avalable in 8 Indian Languages and more are in the pipeline. In months to come OpenOffice.org is set to capture Indian Markets in a big way.

Today, Brasil is a great example with regards to Free Software use and adoption, from the regular user to the Federal Government. Inside this adoption process, OpenOffice.org is one of the main tools, althought, there is a particular aspect in its community development in the country.

In Brasil, the project exists since 2001 and presented various problems, from localization tasks to the trademark, creating a possible trap to our users and developers. "Open Office" is a trademark registered in 1996, on the National Office of Trademarks and Patents, and considering a legal position, it's not possible to use this name or derivated versions.

The Brasilian Community generated critical mass and a support structure for a number of users estimated in more than 7 million users, and with the trademark problem, preventive measures were taken to ensure the ongoing works, like the creation of a NGO called BrOffice.org, with the goal to collect resources to invest in infrastructure and developers in our country, both to OpenOffice.org and related projects, and beyond, to invest in projects that fights against digital and social exclusion.

Today, Brasilian Community, protected by the BrOffice.org trademark, keeps promoting and expanding the user base, encouraging new developers and projects, technology, economicanl and cultural fixation.

This session tries to give insights into what the people using, developing and supporting OpenOffice.org want. For this purpose, data from different OpenOffice.org surveys and metrics will be analyzed and presented. One key data source for the presentation will be the ongoing OpenOffice.org user survey which gets completed by about 2000 people every day. In addition, OpenOffice.org developer surveys, external surveys and various OpenOffice.org user and developer metrics will be brought into the picture as well. The session will try to provide answers to questions like “What functionality do different OpenOffice.org users need?”, “How do people want to contribute to OpenOffice.org?”, “What motivates people to contribute to OpenOffice.org?”, etc.