Next week, I shall be presenting (keynoting) on OpenOffice.org at Gnome.Asia 2009 in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). (See http://2009.gnome.asia/) The summit runs from 20-22 November and promises to be both interesting and large. The OOo community (Vietnamese) as well as others interested in the suite, such as government and business representatives, are slated to be there.
A focus--major focus--is the free desktop, a topic that Stormy Peters of Gnome and I have discussed in a different context. It's an important topic, and though everyone is tired of saying, "This is the year of X," still, informing would-be users (esp. public and private enterprise users) of the existence of real alternatives that provide both the functionality they want as well as develop sustainable ecosystems, is of critical importance. The regional (and global, I hope) emergence from the economic crisis has, I hope, given us all the vantage of a new perspective. Or maybe we'll just repeat the same mistakes. But let's work to make sure we don't. One of my interests in going to Vietnam is to help firm up the community there and see about making it sustainable, so that it does more than localization. We need developers of all levels, and localizers, though important, cannot make a regional community self-sustaining. I'll thus be investigating the nature of the existing ecosystem (support, services, etc.) there, education options (to train users as well as contributors) and the good-will interest of the government and others embarked in moving to free software and OOo in particular. Any help and information the OOo community reading this can provide would be appreciated! Thanks Louis --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@native-lang.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@native-lang.openoffice.org
