It was officially announced on last Saturday the approval of the ODF 1.2 Committee Specification by the OASIS ODF TC, the international committee that develops the ODF (OpenDocument Format) Standard. The next step is the approval of the ODF 1.2 by OASIS, and that ballot should be initiated in a few days.

By OASIS processes, a specification must first be approved by the committee that developed it to be voted by the entire OASIS. In addition to the approved specification at the TC level, it is also necessary to have at least three statements of companies that the standard is being used by them in a interoperable way. We have so far received statements from IBM, Oracle, KDE and Novell.

The major improvements on ODF 1.2 are related with the support for digital signatures, semantic web, and finally a standardized way to store formulas in spreadsheets (OpenFormula).

This announcement marks the completion of the development cycle of ODF 1.2, after 4 years of work. I attended three of these four years and would like to share with you some of the lessons learned.

The first one is to participate in the development of a specification like ODF, which will be used by millions of people around the world is extremely rewarding, but it is also a huge responsibility.

For me, the big challenge for standards developers is to find the balance the need to clearly specify the elements of the standard, with the impact on the innovation at the industry.

Any additional restriction placed on the specification may have an impact as a constraint in project implementation, which means in this case that a misplaced “shall” would restrict  the use cases of electronic documents.

For this reason, we are often obliged to make a recommendation where the most appropriate would be an obligation, and understand those impacts demands a lot of work and usually generates a lot of discussion inside the committee, and we usually discuss until the consensus is reached. Because of that, I believe that it is extremely important to have at committees the representatives of software companies but also representatives of users of the software, because they are the ones who suffer the consequences of a misplaced “shall”.

The second major challenge I faced is related with the lack of support for my strandard development activities in Brazil. Unfortunately this kind of activity has almost ZERO value in Brazilian IT&C industry and the little I could do was based on a lot of stubbornness with a high personal cost.

Anyway, I don’t like to be “another one” sitted at the sofa complaining about how the “developed world” rules over developing countries and my choise was to work without thinking about the profit that my work would bring me (right now, the profit is null and de debt is high).

What motivated most to “keep walking” was the receptivity and respect that I always received from the OASIS ODF TC members, who showed me that Brazil and the Brazilian professionals really have many open doors and opportunities in the technology world and it is up to us to prove that we really can work with technology development. I did my part and the accomplished duty feeling simply pays everything.

I intend to continue working with the ODF TC, and I also intend to continue working at SC34, where I’m a Brazilian expert at the working group that is handling the ODF maintenance at JTC1 (SC34 WG6).

I also understand that completion of the ODF 1.2 closes a cycle in my professional career and in my personal life, and therefore I would like to thank all those who helped me during the past years.

Finally, I would like to end with a quote that motivated me to move on when things get really ugly here:

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