OOoCon 2008. What's next?

Writing this blog post feels a bit like sharing my final thoughts about this year's OpenOffice.org conference. I still cannot believe that only one week ago, I sat in a plane on my way home - the last week passed by without noticing it.

Okay, even my connecting fly just passed by ... because our plane from Beijing was pretty late. So I "enjoyed" one additional night in a hotel nearby. At least, it was payed by the airline, but that did not make it more comfortable :-)

After my job took total control over me, I finally managed to upload my photos to share it with ... the world ... and you. I added some comments, so today I will just skip the explanation about what happened on our last day in Beijing (from the tourist point-of-view).

But, the days in China were not only interesting in terms of OpenOffice.org or visiting Beijing's sights. It was also very helpful for me to get some personal feedback by other community members. One example: People got the impression that the structure and argumentation in my emails made many discussion somewhat "final". From their point-of-view, this is a big problem for new UX members who want to contribute ... those members may be somewhat "frightened". I think that such kind of feedback is very valuable, and I will try to consider that in the future. And if you will ever notice that I "lost my mind" - remind me, please :-)

There are also other things I don't want to get lost. On my way back, I thought about how we can make our contributions more efficient and better in quality to get them better adopted by the developers. Another thought was how we can fulfill the mission statement of the new project "Renaissance" - creating innovation. The funny thing is, that most of the ideas to achieve that have already been mentioned in the last months. Either there was no time on my side or the discussion just got lost... So after this year's conference, my personal goals are:

• Create a place to collect new ideas. You may remember the discussion about UX brainstorming, I mentioned something like the "UX brainwaves" blog. However it will be finally called, it would be great to collect and discuss ideas in one place.

• Get a better understanding for data driven UX approaches. Some months ago, I asked what the UX community thinks about approaches like Personas. Personally, I'm convinced that this is the way to go for complex activities like "Project Renaissance".

• Working on the Writer's notes, again. After presenting the Notes development to the public, I would like to re-intensify my work on them. Yesterday I worked on the "Notes Ruler Control" which hopefully will make it into Writer 3.1. That would be great!

These are my personal favorites, so please feel free to propose topics which you think are important for UX. In the best of all cases, our goals match - especially for the ideas blog the UX project needs help: technical realization, design, ... and ideas. So is there anybody who wants to mastermind that?

That's it for today. Cheers,
Christoph