Open Help Conference

Hi all,

I'm organizing the Open Help Conference this June. It's a gathering of
documentation and support people from various open source and community
projects. There are already participants who contribute to projects like
Firefox, GNOME, and Ubuntu.

http://openhelpconference.com/

There are presentations the first day, but with plenty of time between
for hallways conversations. The second day has open discussions, ending
with an open collaboration session where you can get input from peers
and professional tech writers.

We also have rooms availabe after the conference for team sprints, if
you'd like to use the opportunity to do some face-to-face collaboration.

I'd love to see some people from LibreOffice at the conference, and hear
about what you're doing and how well you're transitioning from the old
OpenOffice world to the more community-oriented LibreOffice.

Thanks,
Shaun McCance
Community Help Expert | Open Help Conference
http://syllogist.net/ | http://openhelpconference.com/

This sounds like a good opportunity, if anyone can get there. Do we have any
active documenters/ help producers in North America? And would TDF be
willing to pay the US$100 registration fee and travel costs for one or more
attendees?

I can't come from Australia; it's too far, too expensive, and I already have
other plans for early June.

Hal

I'm in central Texas, but I don't know if I could be useful enough. I'm too new at all this!

Hi Hal, *,

(...)

This sounds like a good opportunity, if anyone can get there. Do we have
any active documenters/ help producers in North America? And would TDF be
willing to pay the US$100 registration fee and travel costs for one or
more attendees?

I don't think that the TDF will pay currently for this. The TDF is no legal entity at
the moment. It had to be set up (legally) and then the board of the TDF can create a
finance plan that hopefully covers some travel expenses in its marketing section.

At the moment you should search for a sponsor, if you want to attend an event and
don't want to pay everything by your own.

Regards,
Andreas

This sounds like a very good reason for any money raised by sales of
LibreOffice user guides to stay in the Friends of OpenDocument account
until TDF is set up legally. Friends of OpenDocument Inc *is* a legal
entity and can make money available to cover relevant expenses.

At the moment, LO has approx. US$40 in revenue from sales of "Getting
Started with LibreOffice". Obviously this won't even cover the
registration fee for the conference.

IMO a case could be made to use some of the money from sales of OOo user
guides for LO purposes related to documentation, but this would need to
be looked at case by case. Another possibility is for the OOoAuthors
fund (which has over US$8,000 in it) to loan money to the LO-books fund,
to be repaid from future sales of LO books. As long as we remain within
the "objects* of the association", there should be no problem. We do
keep sub-accounts for various groups as well as for the organisation's
own expenses.

BTW, the OOoAuthors accounts are posted here:
http://www.friendsofopendocument.com/newsite/?page_id=194

I usually update the accounts every six months, but I haven't done the
July-Dec 2010 set yet. Money from "GS with LO" sales doesn't appear
until January 2011.

--Jean
* To support the work of community volunteers in promoting, improving
and providing user assistance for the OASIS Open Document Format for
Office Applications (OpenDocument) and open source software designed to
operate on data in this format.