FOSDEM 2013 will be held in Brussels, Belgium, 2-3 Feb 2013 and it is a
huge, free, developer-oriented, technical conference. OpenOffice has
three opportunities to be featured there.
1) The Apache OpenOffice devroom. This is what conferences usually call
a "track", i.e., a series of talks/presentations about Apache
OpenOffice, Sat 2 Feb full day. We need to issue a Call for Talks and
solicit proposals. In our case, a page on a wiki where registered users
can immediately edit pages
(https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS is OK, right?) is
probably best. I'll draft a page there and, if we have consensus, send
it later this week to FOSDEM for dissemination. Timeline: Call published
this week; people can submit proposals until December (21-23 December?);
a small committee selects proposals (who wants to be part of it?);
schedule is announced on 10 January.
2) The Apache OpenOffice booth/stand. See
https://fosdem.org/2013/call_for_stands.html Again, I can take care of
submitting the request, but we will need to be sure that we have enough
people available to attend to it. Mechtilde and Michael will very likely
be there, right? Organizers want to be sure that we will have at least
two people on Sat 2 Feb and Sun 3 Feb, full days. Please state your
availability: if we have enough people, it would be nice to request a
large stand instead of a normal one. Timeline: proposals due by 28 Nov.
3) An Apache OpenOffice speaker in the main track (different from the
devroom because it's held in a large auditorium and is not focused on
one project). As I understand it, this is reserved to high-profile
speakers, but of course the definition of "high-profile" is highly
subjective. The topic should be technical and not too narrow. For
example, a presentation about OpenOffice 4.0 would not qualify; a talk
about the "Cloud version" which is hugely popular with over 16K views on
Slideshare would qualify only if accompanied by a more complete demo and
pointers for people to get involved. At first sight, I wouldn't be sure
that a talk about the future (by then, "current"!) localization process
would qualify; but I'd love to see it featured and, if we believe it has
chances, we can surely go for it too. Please have a look at past year's
main track talks
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/main-tracks.html
and comment here on what would be best to show. I personally won't
propose a main track talk (given by me, I mean) about Apache OpenOffice.
Timeline: proposals due by 1 Dec, but preparing a good proposal might
need a few days.
Regards,
Andrea.
