Open document standards have become increasingly important for organizations across the globe. The Open XML Community is a group of businesses and governments spanning dozens of countries and five continents that support the use of the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats ("Open XML"). Open XML was designed to provide users the benefits of: faithfully representing in an open format existing office documents, interoperability, support across platforms and applications, integration with business data, internationalization, support for accessibility and assistive technologies, and long-term document preservation.
Head over to http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/ and sign up! It is great seeing so much support for Office Open XML. The mist of comments spouted by the usual suspects seems to have been surpassed with actual technical and open discussions. Yay!