This international plugfest is jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium. The event will be held in Brussels on the 14th and 15th of October 2010. The conference room in the “Boudewijn”-building - kindly provided by the Flemish Government - is conveniently located near the Brussels-North railway station.

• October 14-15: Boudewijnlaan 30, 1000 Brussels, Belgium
• Website (under construction): http://www.odfplugfest.be
• Program (under construction)

Follow us on Twitter: #odfplugfest
Join the LinkedIn Group: ODF Plugfest

The Open Document Format (ODF) standard is widely implemented and available on all major platforms,including traditional desktop editors, as well as web and mobile applications. As the application space expands towards a mature, multi-vendor, multi-stakeholder ecosystem, now is the time to act on any challenges in the area of real-world interoperability. Advancing interoperability is facilitated by a variety of cooperative, multi-stakeholder activities, including standardization, test case creation, implementation testing, online validators, plugfests, defect collection and reporting.

representatives from multiple ODF implementations meet informally to discuss interoperability and test their applications in Barcelona in 2007 and in Beijing in 2008. Experience with these informal “interoperability workshops” lead to a more formal initiative, the ODF Plugfest, which first met in The Hague, June 15-16, 2009. The 2nd ODF Plugfest was held in Orvieto, Italy on November 2-3.

This wiki is set up for the ODF Plugfest participants to explore the different levels of interoperability we can test, so we can use the time we have together most effectively. It will generate valuable input which can be fed into the standardization process at OASIS, and provide feedback to implementers of ODF-capable products and services.

From the “State of ODF Interoperability Report”, fromOASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC :

According to ISO/IEC 2382-01, “Information Technology Vocabulary, Fundamental Terms”, interoperability is “The capability to communicate, execute programs, or transfer data among various functional units in a manner that requires the user to have little or no knowledge of the unique characteristics of those units”.

From the perspective of ODF, the document is the data which is transferred, and the functional units are the software applications which create, edit, view and manipulate these documents. Where the document can be successfully transferred among such applications, without the user needing to be concerned with the unique characteristics of each application, then interoperability is high. Conversely, where the user needs to be aware of the quirks of each application, there interoperability is poor.

ODF Interoperability includes concerns such as:

1. The visual appearance of the document at various levels, e.g., glyph, run, line, block, page, etc.
2. The structure of the document as revealed when the user attempts to edit the document, e.g., headers, paragraphs, lists, tables.
3. The behaviors and capabilities of internal and external links and references.
4. The behaviors and capabilities of embedded images, media and other objects.
5. The preservation of document metadata.
6. The preservation of document extensions.
7. The integrity of digital signatures and other protection mechanisms.
8. The runtime behaviors manifest from scripts, macros and other forms of executable logic.