An excellent example of governments working together on open standards like ODF: the Dutch government program 'The Netherlands Open In Connection' started a Dutch ODF usergroup while Fedict, the Belgian Federal Public Service ICT, publishes an ODF news letter in Dutch and French.

We are pleased to announce the 1.2 final version of our open document library.
This version is "production ready" and open source. 

jOpenDocument 1.2 is now available for download and considered as the most advanced java library for document creation and manipulation.

The first public release of the new Simple Java API for ODF is now available for download. This API radically simplifies common document automation tasks, allowing you to perform tasks in a few lines of code that would require require hundreds if you were manipulating the ODF XML directly.

The Simple API is part of the ODF Toolkit Union open source community and is available under the Apache 2.0 license.   JavaDoc, demonstration code and a “Cookbook” are also available on the project’s website.

From Rob Weir: An Antic Disposition.

The presentations of the Brussels ODF Plugfest have been published on the plugfest website.

This 4th edition of the plugfest was jointly organized by the Federal State, the Regions and Communities of Belgium.

On the morning of September 28th, a community of developers and other volunteers announced that they were forming The Document Foundation to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original OpenOffice charter. According to the group, "The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market.