2009/Netherlands

From Document Freedom Day

Baarn

http://www.documentfreedomday.nl/

It went quite fine. There were nine speakers. All of them very interesting. The day started at 12:00. Sander Marechal, lead developer Officeshots.org kicked off with his presentation about Officeshots. Very interesting and a lot of interest of the public. Tom Peelen presented OpenDoc Society, which was the standard story more often told on other conferences, but nonetheless still interesting, and for some people new . Guts Wissema presented IBM and ODF, was quite a short story. David Jacovkis did a lightning talk about the open standards petition to the EC. Fabrice Mous, projectleader ODF dutch governmental program bureau NOIV (Netherlands Open in Connection) gave at first hand a more often told standard story, but it ended in an interesting discussion with the public (journalists among them) about current issues which the NOIV has with national and local governments. Kaj de Vos went on with his presentation about generating ODF from plain text. In this presentation he told about how he generated ODF-templates for the Dutch parliament from plain text files, and why plain text is in fact more "open". There was much interest from the public, and it was quite an eye-opener. IT-journalist Brenno de Winter presented his BigWobber-initiative and why he has asked all the 441 Dutch local governmental bodies for insight in what they have done with the Dutch actionplan "Netherlands Open in Connection (open source, open standards and open document formats)" which was launched end 2007, but still isn't really adopted by Dutch governmental bodies. Aad Koppenhol from Sun Microsystems held a forum discussion with the public about why free market principles do not apply to standards. The discussion had a somewhat open end, but it showed us the different views existing in the open movement. Last but not least, Ruud Baars gave a presentation about OpenTaal/"OpenLanguage". They make Dutch language helpfiles, and also a spell checker, lists of synonyms and grammar checker. One of the interesting things of this project is all the side effets it has. There is someone using their project to make an intelligent screeninput keyboard (he wants to know the most used words in Dutch).

There are also pictures and video's of the day, which will be available soon http://www.documentfreedomday.nl/.