The Southern California Linux Expo 2006 is holding a conference, with a lead-in workshop, on ODF and document accessibility standards in state and local government. February 11-12. The ODF workshop is on the 10th. The conference is on February 11-12. It has just been confirmed that Peter Quinn will be a keynote speaker for the ODF workshop.
*Now* you want to go, huh?
The press release says he will "discuss the reasoning behind the decision to set ODF as a statewide standard. He will provide an overview of his experience during this transition, including the technical and political pitfalls he encountered."
Actually, if you look at all the other speakers and their topics for the SCALE conference, you'll probably want to be there all three days.
Some details from the press release on what will be covered at the ODF conference, which will also have Gary Edwards and David Eisenberg as speakers:
Topics to be covered at this workshop include:* Benefits of open standards versus their proprietary counterparts.
* Technical merits of OpenDocument and XML-based file formats.
* Avoiding vendor lock-in: The importance of choice in software for gorvenment organizations and their constituents.
* The security benefits of heterogeneous software environments.
If you've yet to try GNU/Linux or are new, note that both days of the following conference there will be what they call a "Beginners Tutorial Track," where you can learn how to do things in this operating system, like email, spam filtering, VoIP with Asterisk, secure a network, and use Wine, which makes it possible to use Windows applications from within Linux, for those who aren't yet totally turned off by Windows vulnerabilities and wish to keep a Windows application or have to at work. Also, there is a tutorial on Eclipse on Linux and one on Open Source business applications.
For those who aren't new to this, Hans Reiser speaks on the Reiser4 Filesystem, Steve Friedl on "So you want to be a consultant," Andrew Farley on "Massive storage at low cost coming to a server near you," John Terpstra on the intriguiging topic, "Open Source and the Kid Next Door," Dan Kegel on overcoming desktop obstacles, Jono Bacon on "Building the next generation Linux desktop", and Ted Haeger on "Desktop Innovation on Linux at Novell." Chris Dibona of Google will speak too, as well as Matt Asay on "The next decade of software," exhibitions of KDE4 and the Plasma desktop by Aaron Seigo, David Mandelstam on "Open Source at the PBX," and Andi Gutmans on PHP. Of course, they're on program tracks so you can't go to all of them, but I would if I could.
There isn't one thing listed that doesn't interest me, including the Beginner's Track subjects.