I’d prepared myself to write a post today about yesterday’s approval of the first Committee Draft of ODF 1.2, but Rob Weir wrote a so well written text on his blog that I think that it is a better idea to gently invite yourselves to read it there
The text explains what it means to be a Committee Draft,  the next steps of ODF at OASIS TC and gives some suggestions about how people can help us in this work.

I just want to highlight in Rob’s post, the information that the draft was approved without the support of Microsoft (which now has more than one person on the committee) and Novell. I’m really disappointed to see Microsoft voting against the approval and Novell abstaining, after we had “worked together” for the past months … I know most of you would say “what you expected?” but I still had a tip of hope that they were really changing (ok, silly me).

I also would like to show some numbers about the OASIS ODF TC in 2008, extracted from Rob’s blog too:

* The three ODF TC’s have 81 members from 28 corporations/organizations, as well as 9 individual members. This count does not include the even larger number of OASIS members who are “observers” in these TC’s.

* Large companies with participants in these TC’s include IBM, Google, Sun, Microsoft, Nokia, Oracle, Intel, RedHat, etc. a virtual “Who’s Who” of the tech sector.

* Members reside in 13 different countries.

* 16 TC members are also members of their JTC1 or JTC1/SC34 NB’s. A total of 7 NB’s currently have members in the ODF TC’s.

* The TC’s and SC’s had 95 meetings in 2008 and their current schedule calls for a combined 10 hours of teleconferences per month.

* The main ODF TC had 439 person-hours of meetings in 2008.

* The mailings lists for the TC’s received 2,594 posts in 2008, including 95 agendas and 95 meeting minutes.

* ODF’s public comment list received 603 comments in 2008.

I’m planning to keep you informed here on the blog about the next steps of ODF (and of course, always with an eye open on children that insist to behave badly:) ).