What's happening?
You may have heard about the government's commitment to open standards. Well now the eDocumentation workgroup of the Presidential National Commission on the Information Society and Development is pleased to invite you to an open workshop where you can listen, learn and contribute to the ongoing development of open XML standards aimed at service delivery. And in the true spirit of openness, attendance is free.
The purpose of the workshop is to consolidate (and indeed celebrate!) the work done to date on the adoption of XML standards in the public sector and to prepare the strategic direction for future work on the development, adoption and implementation of information standards to further enhance service delivery.
Why you should attend
It's an exciting program that for the first time in South Africa brings together a potent mix of leading experts, academics, government architects, local and international companies. free software developers, citizens and others.
- Find out how government is promoting and adopting open, royalty-free XML standards for interoperability.
- Learn about key open XML standards such as XSLT, ODF and XForms from leading international and local experts like Rob Weir, Patrick Durusau and Stephen Pepper.
- Discover how the process of standardisation works at the South African Bureau of Standards and internationally
- Participate in the development of new standards which effect you, as users of South African government services
Who's going to be there?
We are in for a real treat with tutorials and presentations from experts and practitioners in government, the South African Bureau of Standards, the Tshwane University of Technology, Microsoft South Africa and a swathe of invited experts, including:
Rob Weir
Rob Weir is the Co-Chair of the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, a member of the OASIS ODF Adoption TC and a member of ICITS V1. He also works for IBM, as a performance architect, as well as on various ODF technical topics. Rob's attendance is supported by IBM.
Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau has been trained as a lawyer, network adminstration, and biblical scholar, all of which probably contributed to his current involvement in standards work. (Whether that is reward or punishment is not certain.) Patrick is the Editor of OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 at OASIS, chairs the ODF Metadata subcommittee of the ODF TC at OASIS, is chair of INCITS V1, convener of the Topic Maps Working Group in ISO and is a co-editor of several parts of the topic maps standard. Patrick also teaches a course on topic maps at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Patrick's attendance is supported by Sun Microsystems.
Jon Bosak
Chaired the OASIS Process Advisory Committee, which created the OASIS Technical Committee Process. Served as member of the ebXML Advisory Board and member of the editorial board of the journal Markup Languages: Theory and Practice. Named "The Father of XML" by the W3C XML Coordination Group (February 2000). Contributed to strategic initiatives at Sun. Formed the UBL Group. Organized and chaired the OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee (http://oasis-open.org/committees/ubl/). Awarded the XML Cup at the XML 2002 Conference, December 2002. Served as Sun Microsystems representative to the RosettaNet Solution Provider Board, 2003. Served on the EIDX Board of Governors, 2004.
Stephen Pepper
Steve Pepper is an independent researcher, writer and lecturer who has worked with open standards for structured information for over two decades. He has represented Norway on ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, the ISO subcommittee for document description languages, since 1995, and convened the Topic Maps Working Group since it was founded. Steve's attendance is supported by the Meraka Institute.
