Experts needed

I've received a couple emails from people asking how
they can help with this effort.  

When I was deciding whether or not to propose this
TC, I asked myself what would be needed to succeed.  If it was just
me, it would not succeed.  It it was just me and 2 or 3 ODF experts,
it would not succeed.  I think that a TC like this would require at
least 6 participants, ideally comprised of experts in the following areas:

Representatives from the major ODF-capable applications
-- at the very least OpenOffice (Sun and Novell versions), Symphony, KOffice,
Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Microsoft Office.

A couple of people who know the ODF standard well

A "toolsmith", someone with excellent scripting
ability (e.g., Python)and knowledge of XML in general to help create time-saving
automation tools that will make this effort possible.

Someone with a formal quality assurance background
who can guide the team into creating high quality test cases.  I know
many of us know the basics, from unit testing, etc.  But it is good
to have someone take the overall responsibility for the quality process.

A technical writer/editor for the TC's formal output

Someone with good outreach skills, especially into
organizations that have adopted ODF.  Especially on the real-world
interoperability tests, I think we need to get into their heads, through
interviews or site visits, and see what interop issues they are really
facing, and make sure that this information is guiding the priorities of
the work.  No sense in us spending months on text styles if spreadsheet
formulas are the things that are causing the most problems.

Experts in specialties such as accessibility, right-to-left
(BiDi) writing systems, East Asian writing systems, etc., so we craft good
test cases for these areas.

Someone foolish enough to volunteer to lead this all

These don't all necessarily need to be different people.
 For example, an ODF expert could all represent an ODF application
and also be the toolsmith.  But these are the kinds of skills that
I think are essential to the TC, if the effort is to succeed. 

-Rob