Open Document Format Plugfest coming to the UK

For the first time ever, the Open Document Format (ODF) event known as the ODF Plugfest is coming to the United Kingdom. The event, which will take place on the 24th and the 25th of February at the Maidenhead Town Hall in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, is expected to bring together both corporate and independent developers to test the interoperability of ODF documents.

ODF Plugfest's provide an opportunity for developers to exchange documents between different implementations of applications that support ODF to make sure that the documents maintain fidelity and that formatting isn't lost or disrupted. For example, calculations in spreadsheets should remain the same, no matter what application opens them.

The first day of the UK ODF Plugfest will be a hack on ODF involving developers and community members from, for example, OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, AbiWord, IBM, Microsoft and Google. The following day will be split into two streams of talks: political and community. The political talks are aimed at educating people on alternatives to closed source in local governments, as well as the use of open source within the UK government, with possible panel discussions. The community stream will include talks from developers on the future of ODF and on integration work currently taking place.

While currently still in the planning phase, the event organisers say that more information, including a list of speakers and time tables, will be out in January. Currently, the organisers are expecting more than 200 people to attend the Plugfest, making it the largest to date. The organisers note that the official ODF Plugfest UK web site, odfplugfest.co.uk, should be online by the second week of January.

Previous ODF Plugfest events have taken place in other countries in the European Union, including Spain and Belgium. The first ODF Plugfest took place in the Hague, Netherlands in mid-2009 and was initiated by the Dutch government to promote the "Three Os", Open Standards, Open Content and Open Source.

(crve)