OpenOffice.org's Community Council

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

OpenOffice.org has come a long way since it was officially rolled out in October, 2000. The group has delivered a full-featured Open Source office suite that is shaping up as a viable competitor to Microsoft Office, at least in some markets.

The group is now looking to revamp its governing process. Until now, decisions have mostly been made by votes on mailing lists or by the project leads of the various projects that make up OpenOffice.org. Now the group is trying to develop a Community Council. The proposal has been kicked around for some time, and is currently being voted on.

We talked to one of the originators of the proposal, Josh Berkus. Berkus is a marketing volunteer for the OpenOffice.org project. According to Berkus, the proposal has been making the rounds for about a year before it got to the final draft that is now being voted on.

In general, he says the Council will be similar to a steering committee. It will help set release dates, coordinate efforts between the OpenOffice.org community and Sun Microsystems, and coordination between specific projects in the project. Berkus also noted that the Community Council will handle some member issues that the group was ill-suited to handle in the past.

Another responsibility for the Council will be to assign resources if a company or organization wants to donate developer time to the project, without a specific feature or goal. Also, Berkus noted that the current structure is not set up to handle donations of money. "The first task is to come up with a legal structure that allows us to accept money." Berkus wasn't sure if the the organization would be seeking non-profit status or not.

The Council will consist of five project leads elected from the leads of accepted projects, Lang (language) Representatives, a Community Contributor Representative and a representative from Sun. The project leads and language reps will have twelve-month terms, and the Community Contributor will hold a six-month term. Sun's rep will be seated for whatever term Sun chooses. The goal is also to stagger elections so only half of the seats are up for election at one time.

When speaking to Berkus, he mentioned that having language group representatives was particularly important. According to Berkus, it can be extremely difficult for non-English speakers to participate in discussion lists that are conducted in English and that being effectively shut out of important lists can lead to misunderstandings and communications issues. "Having them know they have a rep on the Community Council and they have a voice, should do a lot to head off that kind of a problem...they don't have to feel alienated."

One thing that is unusual about the Community Council, for an Open Source project, is that some of the work will take place behind closed doors. In fact, the Community Council members will have to sign confidential disclosure agreements. Berkus explained that, from time to time, the group would be discussing plans that relate to Sun's StarOffice strategy and that it wouldn't be prudent to do that in the open where Microsoft could oversee the StarOffice strategy and revise theirs to match.

Berkus said that the Community Council would not be likely to dictate new features, though they could help coordinate non-technical members of the Community with the technical teams that could implement new features.

As far as new features go, we should be seeing some pretty soon. According to the public roadmap, we should be seeing a public beta of OpenOffice.org 1.1 as early as this month and a final release of 1.1 sometime in July. We all know, however, how changeable software release dates are. From the roadmap and release notes for build 643, OpenOffice.org 1.1 looks to be mostly improvements on existing features and further refinement of the program in general. However, there are a few noteable features that many users will find compelling.

At the top of the list is native PDF export capability. Filter support, in general, is also slated to improve in 1.1, including new filters for DocBook, XHTML and FlatXML. A full list of changes can be found on the OpenOffice.org site. Note that this list may be out of date, as it was last updated in September; a few more improvements are listed on the developer snapshot page.

Meanwhile, the first OpenOffice.org conference is being held at the end of this week in Hamburg, Germany. Expect more interesting news to emerge soon from this important project which has only begun to shake up the desktop Linux landscape.