[Andrew]

Dave, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that OO3 doesn't support collaboration. It's not out of the question that OO4 will get it, but certainly not guaranteed (our styling capabilities are one thing that make simultaneous editing difficult, if that's what you're looking for) and OO4 is not imminent in any case. Sorry I don't have better news on that front.

The good news is that while the default is for OO to write documents in compressed form, you can turn that off on a per-document basis via the Document: Advanced inspector (uncheck "Compress on Disk"). You can turn this off on the default document template to have future documents automatically default to uncompressed. (The uncompressed form is XML.) We use this internally so we can store our documents in Subversion with meaningful diffs.

-andrew