Meeting in the Parliament today

Apparently there has been a meeting in the Parliament today about dual standards. The discussion was among other topics about how to determine the result of the test period next year. The Minister of IT- and Science Helge Sander proposed to ask an independent external consultant to make the conclusions. This proposal was *not* approved by the Parliament.

They agreed on a loose approach to announce a group of independant experts supported by an external consultant.

The group shall evaluate the interoperability between ODF and OOXML and further more evaluate if there shall be only one document format in the future.

The 'Conservatives' wants only one format. They have no idea about what standard that should be.

The 'Labour' is awaiting answers from the experts before they make up their minds. As they say: "We will ask the experts about that".

The 'Liberal' sees no problems in making a single format choice. They also awaits answers from this group of experts.

The final decision is expected next summer.

Source: http://www.computerworld.dk/art/43612

This is quite mysterious because a few months ago, the Parliament agreed to ask the The Danish Competition Authority to be the leader of such investigation on behalf of the Parliament. And during the election last year, almost all political parties (all except the liberals) was pro single standard and ODF as the one.

Have a party - and die

Join this campaign on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6720713873 called

Folk der går med kniv er idioter!

...in English it's something like "Folks who bring knives to the party are idiots!"

The background is very serious. Over the last few years there has been a lot of assaults in the nightlife in Copenhagen and other cities in Denmark. This Christmas wasn't different. A young man was killed just because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time (http://www.bt.dk/article/20080106/krimi/80106024/).

Certification for OpenOffice.org

I joined a new project lately. We are working on a certification program for OpenOffice.org.

I hope that you will be able to call you self Authorized OpenOffice.org user or Authorized OpenOffice.org Specialist some day. Wouldn't that look great on your business card and in your CV ?

Over the last few days I have been reviewing the syllabus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabus) for Writer and Calc. It's hard work and it takes a lot of time. So far we have been using plain text documents. Today I tried to use MindMapping (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindmap) with FreeMind http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ and that has makes the syllabus much easier to overview.

We are not trying to make the training material as it should look. We are only working on the certification, but I expect that learning material will be developed with our syllabus as the outline.

We need people to help us in this work. Teachers and experts. Any one who knows about teaching, certification and people who knows everything about OpenOffice.org.

The original issue still contain much of the work:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=56980

The Spanish native project made a syllabus some time ago. This has been great inspiration to us:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOo_Certification_Syllabus

We use the mailling list (under the documentation project):
http://documentation.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=certification

I just created a few pages on the Wiki (Not much content yet):
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Certification

OpenSourceDays

For the last ten years, the LinuxForum has been the annual event for all Danish (and other Scandinavian) people with interest in open source. The conference has been growing over the years and the team behind it has decided to change the name and scope. This is what they explain:

The highly successful open source conference "Linuxforum", which has already celebrated it's 10th anniversary is now changing name to Open Source Days in order to better reflect that Linux by no means is the only topic of the conference.
The name Open Source Days indicates that during the confererence a vast selection of technical and business open source topics will be covered by the best selection of speakers in a mix between Danish and English.
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris and other open operating systems - and all of the applications running of these operating systems will be in focus during Open Source Days 2008.

Read more here: http://www.opensourcedays.org/2008/

The conference will be held October 3th. and 4th. http://www.opensourcedays.org/2008/about/

To better support the continuously growing event, the coordinators has decided to establish a foundation. The formal establishment meeting will take place on January 8th. at Niels Bohr Institutet in Copenhagen. Read more about the meeting here: http://friends.opensourcedays.org/

Show up and join.

Official message from Norway

This is the official (in English) message from the Norwegian government:
http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/fad/pressesenter/pressemeldinger/2007/Open-document-standards-to-be-obligatory.html?id=494810

The Government's decision is as follows:

HTML will be the primary format for publishing public information on the Internet.
PDF (PDF 1.4 and later or PDF/A ISO 19005-1) is obligatory when there is a wish to keep a document's original appearance.
ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) is to be used to publish documents to which the user should be able to make changes after downloading, e.g. public forms to be filled out by the user. This format is also made obligatory.