If you are a citizen of the UK, or just a resident, please consider signing this petition to promote OpenDocument in the UK government.
The petition is on the vague side. I believe that petition should have more specific request items than this one has, but it still serves a valuable purpose in that it shows that this is an issue for many. So I do recommend that you go there and sign it.
The petition ends on 9 May 2007 and there are 1,169 signatures so far. The attentive reader will notice that I too signed the petition. I am not a UK citizen, but since right now I’m still residing in the UK, so I get to sign it too 
Just one step forward for the Fellowship’s ODF Validator: It now checks if all images are included in zipped archive. Kudos to Roman for his work on the validator.
We have more features planned for the future. For example, we want to check objects for the use of ODF’s accessibility features. That could be very handy. We also plan additional sanity checks, like verifying that every style that is used is actually defined somewhere.
All in all, the ODF Validator is looking great, and new features are being added over time.
It looks like the Fellowship’s ODF Validator has gotten some attention. We’ve had 700 visitors, 300 of which have used the validation service. Rob Weir blogged about it a while ago and it was picked up by a Czech news site.
In his blog, Rob asks about our privacy policy:
One thing I’d like to see is an explicit privacy policy statement on the Fellowship’s web site, so the user knows what things may or may not be done with the documents they upload.
Rob, sorry I didn’t see your post earlier. We take privacy seriously. I just talked to Cyclone3 and we put together the following privacy policy:
We take your privacy seriously. Neither the Fellowship nor Cyclone3 will ever sell or distribute any document you upload. Uploaded documents are not used for any purpose other than validation. All documents are destroyed as soon as validation is complete.
Posted by Daniel
on April 10, 2007
Open Source / Open Standards /
1 Comment
Last week Marbux mentioned a new ODF application called Peepel and I decided to take a look…
Peepel is a web-based office suite, so it competes with Google Docs and similar services. Like Google, Peepel provides both word processing and spreadsheet functionality. Un-like Google, Peepel gives you a “virtual desktop” where you can have several documents open in a single browser window. You can move windows around, maximize, minimize, etc.
Peepel has a “Panel” that changes according to the application you are using. That looks like a pretty good idea. Personally I like it, and I think it’s an application well worth watching.
Peepel is still Beta, so it would be unfair to be too picky. The spreadsheet already uses a simplified variation of ODF as its native format, and the Writer component is set to receive ODF support in the coming weeks.
In a conversation with Stephen Kelly from Peepel he said to me “It [is] our intention to support OpenDocument as our preferred file format. Although this decision was made for a number of reasons, we felt that OpenDocument’s acceptance by the ISO would lead to an increased level of trust between us and our users. This is a goal we are determined to meet and are working towards it presently.“.
I did notice some issues when I tested the ODF export on the Fellowship’s ODF Validator, but they don’t look problematic. The development team will take a look. Chatting with Stephen it seems like ODF support is pretty high on their priority list.
Personally I’m pretty excited about Peepel. The product looks very promising, and I think it’ll give Google Docs a run for its money.
