At a town hall meeting at Google headquarters, U.S. Senator Barack Obama unveiled an innovation agenda to connect and empower Americans through technology. The comprehensive plan will ensure the full and free exchange of information by protecting the openness of the internet and encouraging diversity in media ownership, create a transparent and connected democracy by opening up government to its citizens, modernize the US communications infrastructure, employ technology and information to take on the challenges facing America, and improve the nation's competitiveness.

CDF is one of the very many useful projects that W3C has been laboring on, but not one that you would have been likely to have heard much about. Until recently, that is, when Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser and Marbux, the management (and perhaps sole remaining members) of the OpenDocument Foundation decided that CDF was the answer to all of the problems that ODF was designed to address. This announcement gave rise to a flurry of press attention that Sam Hiser has collected here.

Members of the OASIS OpenDocument Technical Committee have approved a Committee Draft version of the "Accessibility Guidelines" for public review. Open Document Format v1.1 Accessibility Guidelines Version 1.0 is a guide for Office Applications that support version 1.1 of the OpenDocument format, to promote and preserve accessible ODF documents. The public review period ends 21-December-2007.

IBM is challenging Microsoft with a game of "anything you can do I can do." Its new Lotus Symphony office suite -- now available as a public beta -- does much of what the $400 Standard edition of Microsoft Office does, only at a much better price: It's free.

This year's Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) to be held Oct. 15-16 in Portland, Ore., will close with panelists from Microsoft, Sun, IBM and the OpenDocument Foundation weighing in on Open Document Formats.