You are currently browsing the SolidOffice weblog archives for June, 2009.
Louis passes along the message that OpenOffice.org has been chosen as a finalist for the 2009 Community Choice Awards in the category of Best Project for Government.
Click the image below to visit the site and vote for OpenOffice.org! And be sure to check out all the other great projects while you’re there.
OpenOffice.org’s Project Renaissance continues to progress, with the announcement last week in Elizabeth Matthis’ post UI Design Proposals Wrap Up and a Look Forward that “17 proposals were submitted and reviewed by our brilliant and creative community members. They contain a total of 145 user interface design mockups. (Wow!) There were 80 comments or questions added by OOo-community reviewers.”
She highlights some of the proposals and includes several design mockups in the post to illustrate the participation levels already achieved.
What’s Next? The Renaissance team is determining which ideas (note: mixing and matching will happen here!) appear to implement the design directives* most successfully. Those that do will be used to create a handful of (wire frame) prototypes. Later, the concepts the Renaissance team is working on will be the basis for mid-fidelity prototypes that will be validated in tests: We need to confirm that the UI changes will be real improvements and will be well-accepted before we roll them out to our whole user base.
The team will publish further information as they go, so stay tuned! The excitement isn’t over yet.
In a recent post, the North-by-South blog announces Brazil is aggressively expanding their Telecentro program, community free software workshops and technology education.
The Brazilian National Support Project for Telecentros (public computer labs with free, public Internet access) intends to support the deployment of 2 – 3,000 new Telecentros and towards achieving the goal of 10,000 active Telecentros by the year 2010. Almost all of the Telecentros are built using entirely free and open source software. Adding to the social benefit of the project, the rapid timetable will be met by training Brazilian youths on how to install Linux, configure the workstations and servers, and get the Telecentros online, up and running.
What an excellent national project that will pay future dividends as generations of Brazilians learn computer skills on open platforms, and then become the very developers to advance those platforms in turn.