OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon 2003)
March 20th - March 21st 2003
University of Hamburg, Germany

Meet the community, users, and community sponsors at the first OpenOffice.org Conference. The conference will take place right after CeBIT, which ends March 19th. Hamburg is only 100 miles (160 Kilometers) from Hannover. The conference will attract some high-profile keynote speakers from the developer community, European politics, the open-source movement, and our main sponsor, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Confirmed keynote speakers are amongst others the Open Source Advocate Mitchell Baker as well as the VP of Engineering of the Desktop Solutions Group at Sun Microsystems Curtis Sasaki. The conference will include some limited exhibition space.

Miguel de Icaza and Bruce Perens both say that OpenOffice.org is THE most important Open Source project because people can try it without switching from Windows and if they do they'll discover that Open Source can work for them. They no longer have to pay big bucks for office productivity.

"We applaud to see the many contributions from the community take the openoffice.org project much further than we had anticipated so quickly. It is a testament to the thousands of contributors in the community who want to see an open, full featured office productivity suite available on many platforms and in so many languages. I wanted to personally congratulate all of you for your dedication and efforts to make openoffice.org a shining example of the benefits of open technologies, open file formats, and an open style of doing work."
Curtis Sasaki, VP Desktop Solutions, Sun Microsystems

"I've seen the OpenOffice.org community evolve over the last two years into a place where Sun and the community really do work together towards the common goal of making office productivity available at low or no cost to everyone. Their work is driving a lot of the interest in Open Source that we're seeing now in emerging markets like India and China. It is my sincere hope that more developers will show up to work on the OpenOffice.org project so the community can really make it their own", says Danese Cooper, Sun's Open Source Diva.

The conference will be the perfect place to exchange ideas with other contributors or to meet face-to-face with people you have only known from email.

The conference will cover the following OpenOffice.org topics organized in two tracks:

General			Development
	General Usage and Features			Software Development Kit
	Business and Governemt			Porting
	Marketing			Localization
	Standards (especially XML)			Filters
	Open Source			QA
	The Community

The two tracks of sessions are targeted at both users and developers. The general sessions will talk about lessons learned during migration and deployment, the OpenOffice.org roadmap, standardization efforts through OASIS and Open Source philosophy. Topics for developers cover the overall process, QA, porting and localization as well as the new Software Development Kit.

There were many paper submissions, far more than could fit into the two days of the conference. We opened a third track for Standards (esp. XML) at Thursday.
The schedule gives an overview of the sessions.

For registering as an attendee please go to http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/registration.html
The admission fee will be EUR 20 and will be collected at the event.

Companies that are interested in participating in the conference as an exhibitor or sponsor can find registration details at http://marketing.openoffice.org/conference/sponsors.html

The OpenOffice.org Conference Team
(with kind support of organisations mentioned below)