This is my first year as lead and therefore also my first annual status
report. Trough out the past year I have tried to keep you all up to date
on my blog: http://lodahl.blogspot.com. In periods I wrote blog posts
every day. I'll try to continue this in the future, though in a lower
frequency.
What happened in the passed year ?
First of all, my English is getting much better. I hope you can all
agree with me on that.
I started as coordinator for the Danish localization project on March
1th., but in fact I have been the project leader from about January 1th.
I had no idea of how tough it would be and no body could know how things
should develop in Denmark and in the rest of the World.
I started out trying to get the project organized by handing out some of
the most important daily tasks. I knew that I couldn't do it all by my
self. We organized our selves with a webmaster, a QA-master and I also
tried to get a new person to take up the documentation. This was what I
used to do before.
Unfortunately it didn't work out the way I had hoped. Very few people
from the Danish community was ready to take direct responsibilities. But
at the same time we have seen a few new names on the mailing lists this
year and I'm very happy about that. We are twenty people on the list of
active volounteers.
The Danish community deliberately has no funds at all. That way we avoid
discussions about how to spend the money. But on the other hand, it
would be nice if we had a million.
One of our goals for 2007 was to use Bouncer for handling the downloads.
We need that for two purposes:
1) activation of automatic update
2) download statistics. Unfortunately we didn't succeed on this issue
because no one has been able to tell us how it works.
We are translating new versions (almost) on time.
One of the most important sub projects was the new Danish spell checker
(we call it 'Stavekontrolden'). We didn't have control of the words in
the old one and we didn't believe that we could develop the old list
fast and firm as we would like to. So we established a brand new list
and new affix definitions from scratch based on hunspell. After only
twelve months, it was possible for us to announce the first release. We
made a comparison of our new spell checker against the old list and it
showed that we had reached a break-even on quality. Since then the
quality has increased day by day. The resulting spell checker will be
integrated in OpenOffice.org 2.4.
Another achievment is that we have managed to organize a monthly
newsletter from the community. The list of recievers has increased from
600 to nearly 1.000 people over the year and I find that a success. We
are continously trying to improve the content of the newsletter. The
newsletter is in Danish, but you can see an example here
http://doc.oooforum.dk/Nyhed/2008Januar.pdf
Another thing in year 2007 was the political situation in Denmark. The
Danish Parliament was about to agree on implementing open standards in
most public authorities but unfortunately the Parliament was accepting
both ODF and EOOXML file formats. I and several other people from FOSS
communities was fighting and it ended up with a compromise: Microsoft is
accepted for now, but must prove their openness in the development
process. The Danish Competition Authority has been by the Parliament to
monitor the process. My major domestic contribution to the process in
the Parliament, was when I was granted a meeting (in the parliament in a
sub committee).
During the year, I have tried to get a good relationship with the press.
This is one thing I'm still working on. I have good contact with a
marketing bureau that helps us when we need to get in touch with the
press. The press coverage is usualy positive but I find it very
difficult to catch the journalists interest.
Some of the Danish participants made CDs with OpenOffice.org and gave
them away to all Members of Parliament and all municipal IT-managers.
The CDs to the MP's raised some debate in the media, because the the
MP's was not allowed to install OpenOffice.org on their computers in the
Parliament. We hope to solve this problem in the coming year. In 2008 we
expect to produce CD for all public libraries in Denmark.
In the late summer we worked together with several other FOSS
communities in the process in 'Danish Standards' to make sure that
Denmark would disapprove EOOXML at ISO. Denmark voted No.
During the year I have tried to keep the international community
up-to-date with information by writing on my blog. 173 posts in 2007. I
will continue that work in the future, but not that many posts I think.
I find blogging a very useful communication channel.
One of the Danish IT newsletters are making an annual questionaire among
their readers. This year about 60% of the answering readers says that
they have a positive impression of OpenOffice.org. Just a few years ago
only 20% knew what OpenOffice.org was. Today OpenOffice.org is
considered a serious alternative to Microsoft Office and we meet new
references all the time. One of the most important new references on the
list is the University of Southern Denmark. The battle for open document
standards was on 4th. place of most important issues in IT in 2007.
What can we expect in 2008 ?
I expect that a few Danish authorities will use OpenOffice.org and that
several municipals will use OpenOffice.org. Right now I'm working on a
case where public schools are saving lots of money by avoiding expensive
software. I expect that lots of schools will switch to OpenOffice.org in
this year.
A wish for 2008 ?
I wish that one or two of the public authorities will contribute to the
project. I think thats what we need the most in Denmark right now:
Public acknowledgment.
It's my hope that 2008 will bring us a little closer to an explanation
on hos Bouncer works and how we (the Danish community) can take
advantage of it.
Best regards, and happy new year to you all
Leif Lodahl
Native-Language coordinator DA.OpenOffice.org
Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blog: http://lodahl.blogspot.com/
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