SolidOffice
Home of The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org

ABC – About, Bio, Contact

About:

SolidOffice was first launched in 2003, and was updated using WordPress in April 2005. The purpose of the site is to collect information about the growth of open source software, particularly OpenOffice.org and particularly for the Mac platform. It is also meant to promote The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org and other projects. SolidOffice was created and is maintained by Benjamin Horst.

See my ClaimID profile for many of the sites I’ve created: hCard

Benjamin Horst Bio:

Benjamin Horst completed public high school in three years, entering Vassar College at 16 under the Early College Admissions program. He studied Mandarin Chinese and Geography and taught himself web design. Horst spent the fall of 1997 in Beijing for his semester abroad, and celebrated his 19th birthday within days of arrival there.

He graduated from Vassar in 1999 with a BA in Geography and backpacked North America for seven weeks, covering everything from Boston to Chicago to Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, and Southeast Alaska and reached a northernmost point of Dawson City in the Yukon Territory of Canada.

From 1999 to 2001, Horst studied Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he was President of the Mac Computing Group and Webmaster of the Harvard Urban Planning Organization (HUPO). He studied GIS, green design, real estate and international urban development.

With his 2001 Master in Urban Planning degree, Horst worked as a GIS Analyst for civil engineering firm Chazen Companies in Poughkeepsie, NY, moved to Los Angeles where he wrote and published “The Tiny Guide to OpenOffice.org” and then worked for startup SharedBook Inc in New York City from 2004 to 2007.

Currently, he provides freelance software consulting and web development with a focus on open source software, and has helped many small and large companies migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, collectively saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in software licensing fees.

Public Speaking:

Horst has spoken about OpenOffice.org, open source software and Free Culture on a number of occasions:

  • Vassar College Media Cloisters: “Gaming and Virtual Words” Panel
  • Comdex 2003
  • University of Southern California Linux User Group
  • National Hispanic Women’s Leadership Conference
  • Vassar College Media Cloisters: “Free Culture and the University”
  • Free Culture National Summit 2006 at Swarthmore College
  • Westchester (NY) PC Users’ Group
  • OpenOffice.org Conference 2007 in Barcelona, 2007
  • FOSS Camp 2007 at MIT: “Guerrilla Marketing for Open Source”

See Presentations for more details of these events.

Contact:

Benjamin Horst can be mailed at bhorst at mac dot com or benjaminhorst at gmail dot com.