nbsp;OpenOffice.org is becoming more and more widely used. OpenOffice.org’s Open Document Format (ODF) has received both OASIS and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approval - a first for an office file format - and some countries, such as Belgium and Malaysia, to name but two, will be migrating government offices to ODF. But for all the application’s and format’s popularity, users lack a wealth of templates and clipart. Let’s change that!

Here then is the challenge: Create and submit templates and clipart as part of the competition and be eligible for a share of the cash and other awards totaling over US$5000. (You are always welcome to send in works outside the contest as well.) Winners will be given the opportunity of including their templates in the OpenOffice.org installation sets (details on licensing here).

The OpenOffice.org Documentation Project is running this competition in conjunction with Worldlabel.com, which is generously providing the funding for the prizes. We hope this contest is but a start of others, and we also think it is a fine occasion for the community to show their support of OpenOffice.org and contribute. We are thus calling on each user of the suite to provide templates or clipart items and send these in. These will ultimately become publicly available from here.

Contest Duration/Deadline
The competition will run from September 20, 2006 to October 31, 2006 at 23h59EDT (GMT-4). Submissions with a received datestamp later than 23h59EDT (GMT-4) on October 31, 2006 will not be eligible. Awards and prizes will be announced on December 1, 2006.

Conditions of participation

• Everyone can participate.
• All templates submitted must be presented in open OpenOffice.org template format (e.g., * ott * for Writer templates). Clipart may be in any of the graphic formats OpenOffice.org is able to import, plus SVG as the SVG import filter, allows these to be opened. Graphics submitters should take care to ensure that their submission is not modified by the export/import process, as the file will be opened in OpenOffice.org and it is this version that will be the one considered as your contribution.
• All templates must comply with our licensing schemes. We explain that in more detail here.