2013 has been one of the best years for LibreOffice in Brazil
and it is becoming even better.
The Brazilian community outperformed itself in all kind of activities around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation during 2013. We attended ten events, signed an important agreement and got our first LibreOffice certified developer. It was also time to start looking at our neighbors in Latin America.
Events
We participated in ten events sponsoring activities in LibreOffice. The FLISOL 2013 in Brasilia to invite new developers to join our development. The FSLDC 2013 in Duque de Caxias, promoting LibreOffice to a broad audience of users and developers. The Document Freedom Day 2013 was also coordinated by the Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and sponsored by SINDPD-RJ.
FSLDC Duque de Caxias
FLISOL – Brasília: Call for new developers. From left to right: Deivi Kuhn, Henderson Matsuura, Olivier Hallot
The Document Freedom Day in Rio de Janeiro. From left to right: Eliane Domingos, Marcelo Soriano and Marcio Monteiro
The Lecture Cycle of SINDPD-RJ regularly talked on LibreOffice new developments on each major release in 2013, accessing a focused set of IT professionals and FOSS advocates. The Santa Catarina State LibreOffice community also had its 2nd LibreOffice Meeting that included a hack day for students interested in starting to contribute code to LibreOffice and the SOLISC (in the same state) also had lectures on LibreOffice, lead by Klaibson Ribeiro.
Then we had our major event, FISL 14 in July 2013, where we brought Italo Vignoli, Bjoern Michaelsen and Olivier Hallot of The Document Foundation Board of Directors to lecture on LibreOffice migrations, LibreOffice community engagements and LibreOffice development. At the same event the State of Rio Grande do Sul and The Docuemnt Foundation agreed to partner for the deployment of Open Document Formats and LibreOffice within the State public administration, aiming a few hundred thousands desktops.
FISL 2013: The State of Rio Grande do Sul adopts ODF and LibreOffice as document edition format and tool of choice.
FISL 2013: Community gathering at the largest opensource event in Brazil: From left to right: Olivier Hallot, Bjoern Michaelsen, Italo Vignoli (TDF), Dr. Richard Stallman (FSF), Eliane Domingos, Gustavo Pacheco, David Jourdain (LibreOffice community)
Next in August we had the CONSEGI, in Brasilia, where the federal public administration get together to deal with a broad set of issues related to FOSS, and where our Chairman Florian Effenberger was invited as keynote speaker, together with most of the Brazilian community to run lectures, workshops and round-tables on FOSS and LibreOffice. The Document Foundation represented by Florian and Ms Eliane Domingos received the “Demoiselle” Award in recognition of the contribtion for the communities of open source software.
CONSEGI 2013: The “Demoiselle” award for achievements in the OpenSource community to The Document Foundation (Florian Effenberger) and Eliane Domingos (LibreOffice Brazilian community)
In October, we ran the LibreOffice show and partied for its 3rd birthday in Latinoware, an event that happens in Foz do Iguaçu, in the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, sponsored by Itaipu Binacional, the company that operates the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam. This event is a gathering of several nationals interested in promoting FOSS among their citizens and a project to translate LibreOffice to guarani, the native language of Paraguay, emerged.
Celebrating LibreOffice Anniversary in LatinoWare 2013: from left to right: Julio Neves, Eliane Domingos, Vitorio Furusho, Klaibson Ribeiro and João Fernando
Finally we attended CISL-2013, the Argentinian congress for open source in Buenos Aires to deliver 3 lectures on LibreOffice achievements, on migrations, development and community gathering, in an effort to stimulate the Argentinian community to get more active.
CISL 2013 in Buenos Aires: Olivier Hallot (TDF) sharing experience in migrations for large organizations.
Development
All events of 2013 also aimed to harvest new developers for LibreOffice. From initial compilation to the first patches, the developer community grew in quantity and quality. We were able do send two Brazilian developers to Freiburg, Germany to participate in the Freiburg Hackfest. We were happy that Marcos Souza got his LibreOffice Developer Certification.
The high profile developer team in Freiburg Hackfest: Michael Stahl, Marcos Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Stephan Bergman and Eike Rathke
Community
The community also has it say in 2013. The documentation team leaded by Raul Pacheco and Vera Cavalcante finished the translation of the Writer and Calc User Manual. This is a huge effort that the Brazilian collaborators undertake to bring knowledge to end-users, not only in Brazilian Portuguese but also for the broader Portuguese-speaking community.
The LibreOffice Magazine, an e-magazine in PDF writen and edited by the Brazilian community leaded by Eliane Domingos e Vera Cavalcante, released 6 editions on time with more than 70 A5 pages each full of information on open source software in general, LibreOffice tutorials and case studies for migration and deployments. This magazine is actually edited on a collaboration basis and is not funded by advertisements or any other means. We recorded an average of 20.000 downloads of the magazine on each edition and we have 449 followers of the magazine twitter account.
Celebrating the 3rd anniversary of LibreOffice and the 1st of LibreOffice Magazine
Responding to the trend towards social networks, the community also gathered around LibreOffice in FaceBook, Twitter and Google+. In these profiles, we have 1900 followers in the LibreOffice facebook page as well as 1400 more in the LibreOffice Facebook group. On Twitter, we have 1800 followers and 1328 in Google+.
Last, but not least, the year ended with the Document Foundation Board of Director elections where our colleague Eliane Domingos was elected. That will make 2014 even better to follow!
Olivier Hallot
Like this:
Like Loading...
