I’d like to propose three roadmap items and suggest owners of these. 1. ODF support. Owner: Dennis. Task: What do we need, abstractly and—more usefully?—concretely to support ODF, or at the least, ODT, in a usable (however you judge) manner? From my perspective, usability means being able to open fairly simple documents, edit them within the original styles, then return to sender or otherwise pass them to others. Ambition here is great; but so is usable proof of concept.
The need for ODF may be waning, at least in some circles. But I’d think the situation is just that there are layers upon layers, and desktop usage, complemented by tablets (and the like) able to manipulate ODF/ODT is inevitably going to grow, and not slowly. ODF would be and is preferred by quite a few, if in percentage smaller than MS’s format, simply because governments have policies preferring it, though actions speak louder. I don’t see galvanising advancements in the format and I think it would be misguided to dump watts of brainpower energy into doing it, at this point. I do see continued demand and need for devices able to manipulate ODF. Same for OpenOffice’s implementation of ODF. 2. Documentation for developers. Owner: Peter (and others?). Task: Outline for documentation explicating goal and architecture briefly, allowing for future additions as needed. Every time I talk to Peter he allows he must do documentation. I think in part that’s because he alone has the full architecture in mind (his) and also because it would save him and others (like the rest) time to know that architecture before launching into the bog of mistaken intention and incoherent code. is that true, though? Or: What could be done now to produce outlines for documentation. My experience elsewhere has been that documentation is often written as it is needed, like a map is drawn after land is discovered: to chart the better narrative for others, so that they don’t make your mistakes. If so, what can the rest of us do to help? "Us" could include students, newbies, moi, and so on. 3. GSoC and also Jan’s discovery, Semester of Code. I want to press ahead on this and see if we can get a grant. There are some students at the University of Toronto who could, conceivably be qualified and interested. I can take this on, or part of it, but am not sure where to focus; I can correspond with Dennis on this? louis
