I attended last week’s ODF Workshop in South Africa, and I really enjoyed the event. It was an excellent opportunity to meet people who work with ODF in governments around the world, exchange experiences on migration, talk about the new features on ODF 1.2 and talk a lot about other things that I really appreciate as interoperability and open standards adoption worldwide.

Brazil was represented by Paul Maia, from Caixa Economica Federal and Carlos Machado of SERPRO. I had the opportunity to make a brief presentation about the main features of ODF 1.2 that we’re developing at the OASIS ODF TC.

Machado presented SERPRO and spoke about how the open standards and interoperability are important for the efficient implementation of solutions in free software within the SERPRO, in addition to submitting an overview on the current situation of open standards and free software at the Brazilian federal government.

Paulo Maia presented Caixa (which has impressive numbers) and spoke about e-ping (Brazilian interoperability framework) and his role on the committee that develops it, and document called Brasilia Protocol and the related maturity model that he is developing (with the collaboration of some people, including me).

We also had the participation of Carlos Gonzales, from Venezuela, who presented the current status of open standards in the Venezuelan government, its option to use free software and gifted us with the wonderful news that the adoption of ODF in Venezuela is on the final stage of signatures collection.

The image below was taken from the presentation by Bob Sutor, and shows the status of the adoption of ODF around the world.

I recommend a look at all the other presentations made (here), all of high quality and with very good stories about  ODF and open standards.

It was a good opportunity to review old friends (and fellow Fighters:) ), make new friends and spend a few days with the people that contributed much to what we Brazilians are today. I found answers to many questions about our people simply observing the people of South Africa and recommend to all the travel.

I would like to close with Gandhi’s words, presented at the brilliant speech of a friend from India, Mr. Justice (believe if you wish, a supreme court judge talking about odf) in the second lecture of the workshop. Those words don’t left my mind for a moment in recent days:

“Be the change you want to see in the world”

The master said, we obbey