Announcing LibreOffice New Generation
Today we’re announcing a new project: LibreOffice New Generation. This isn’t about the software, but about the people behind it. As you probably know, LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of certified developers and volunteers, working on the source code, translations, documentation, design, QA, marketing, infrastructure and other areas.
Well, we want to reach out to even more people, so read on to find out more…
What is this?
LibreOffice New Generation is our project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While we’re proud that our community is diverse and has people from all ages, younger people help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to the project. So we want to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.
Who can join?
Anyone! If you’re a school or university student and use LibreOffice, we’d love to hear from you. What do you use LibreOffice for? How can it be improved? Can we help you to spread the word? Join us and let’s work together to make LibreOffice even better!
But everyone else is welcome to join too. The Document Foundation is a small non-profit, so we’d appreciate all help with bringing younger contributors into the project and helping them to get involved with our teams.
What will you do?
Many students who contribute to free and open source software projects like to have something which confirms their work. At TDF we’ve been issuing Open Badges for community contributions – these are special badges with metadata inside, showing what someone did. So we’d like to start issuing these to younger and newer community members too.
We have other ideas and projects, but we’d like to hear from you about your experiences! What else can we offer? How can we credit and reward contributors for their work? Let us know what you think…
How can I join?
If you’d like to discuss ways to get more younger people involved in the LibreOffice community, join our Telegram group where we can discuss Open Badges and other ideas for LibreOffice New Generation. (For all other discussions and suggestions for LibreOffice, please see the general group.) If you’d like to suggest something directly, email me (Mike) and we’ll have a chat.
We look forward to meeting you, and hearing your ideas and experiences!
Please include a native citing and bibliography tool for students. Ms office has this. At the moment I have to use Mendeley, which is not great.
Check out zotero – open source and compatible with libreoffice
Não concordo que estudantes mais jovens podem contribuir mais para o desenvolvimento de melhorias, a real usabilidade do sistema não é apenas para editor de texto e trabalhos escolares, utilizo planilhas, editor,crio apresentações e creio que a utilização destas três plataformas, significam muito para o meio empresarial, fazer desenhos bonitos é válido mas o libreoffice não é só isso pelo menos a meu ver, acho que também é coisa de gente grande!
Hi, this blog is in English – please post in English so we can continue the discussion! We can look at expanding the plan into more languages in future, but while we make a strategy, let’s stay with one language for now…
This blog post was supposed to be a call to bring on more people. Does being condescending and uninviting to the world’s other languages help with that?
Is that what appeals to the younger generations these days?
Or was this posted in a variety of different languages on different blogs? I dunno, I haven’t checked.
But here’s their post translated simply with Google translate.
Vander Luz
“I do not agree that younger students can contribute more to the development of improvements, the real usability of the system is not only for text editor and school work, I use spreadsheets, editor, create presentations and I believe that the use of these three platforms, mean a lot to the business world, making beautiful drawings is valid, but libreoffice is not only that, at least in my view, I think it is also the thing of great people!”
Sorry? Every language is equal, and we have lots of native-language projects in LibreOffice, which are great. But we are a very small non-profit with extremely limited resources. Having lots of discussions going on in many different languages would hugely dilute the efforts and make it difficult to come up with a cohesive strategy. Let’s get a strategy and plan going first, and then look at implementing it in many other languages.
Right on Mike. We can focus much better in English. Other languages in a blog tend to muck up the focus.
Well… “gente grande” (“great people”? Parece que os tradutores ainda não são tão precisos assim) lida com recursos muito além do que estudantes/universitários utilizam no LibreOffice. Então é meio esquisito que “gente grande” ainda não possua o idioma inglês entre suas competências (competências, não apenas certificações ou aquilo que estiver no currículo), nem que para emitir sua crítica/opinião.
Sorry… In English (may conyain errors but not due to automated translators):
Well… “gente grande” (“great people”? It seem that the translators are not that precise yet) – grown ups – make use of many resources besides those students do in LibreOffice.
So it’s a little awkward that “gente grande” still don’t have English as their competences (competences, not certificates nor what is written in their curriculum/resume), even if what would be needed to emit their criticism/opinion.
Translators are very helpful but isn’t it a little awkward that “gente grande” (grown ups) who use many advanced LibreOffice’s resources should be the (only) helpful source for improving it but these “grown ups” don’t still have English in their extended list of competences (which is differwnt from having English listed in their curriculums or having an English idiom course certificate)?
Use translators 🙂
By Vander Luz
I do not agree that younger students can contribute more to the development of improvements, the real usability of the system is not only for text editor and school work, I use spreadsheets, editor, create presentations and I believe that the use of these three platforms, mean a lot to the business world, making beautiful drawings is valid, but libreoffice is not only that, at least in my view, I think it is also the stuff of great people! (I just used Google translate for the text from Vander Luz)
Basically he thinks younger people can’t help because young adults and kids only use LibreOffice to write school works and LibreOffice should be adults-only and focus on spreadsheets and presentations.
In the Telegram channel, one of the younger users suggested opening a Discord channel because many young people use that platform instead of Telegram. The user was soon dissuaded and complied by shutting it down.
I’m seriously frustrated when a project I actually am a big fan of, keeps shooting itself in the foot. It seems the project is so large and yet disconnected from its user base and comes across as suffering from a massive blind spot.
We have nothing against Discord, but we had only just launched the New Generation project, and already some people were fragmenting communication into other channels. This makes it really difficult to have a cohesive plan and strategy, when people are talking in different places. That’s why we asked to close it (for now), until we have a proper community and plan in place. Later, we can add Discord and other channels, of course.
It means you can use any free translator as Goggle translator or Deepl
I tried a number of times to donate, but none of the means were suitable to me.
In India, most of us have debit cards, not credit cards. So please make provisions suitable for all Indians to enable them donate.
Hi, thanks for your interest in donating! We have many other ways to donate, including debit cards, PayPal, bank transfers, Flattr, digital currencies and more: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/ – Hopefully one works for you!
Hi Mike,
I’ve lived in India for a year and it’s really not that easy to get your money outside the country without a credit card. I believe that most (young) people who do digital transactions use India-only services like Paytm, PhonePe, RuPay, and recently WhatsApp and Google Pay. Especially the first two were extremely popular in 2017. It’s powered by a system called Unified Payments Interface.
Anyways, I don’t know how to resolve that issue – perhaps, someone could do some research on supporting country-specific payment methods?
Hi Theo, thanks for your feedback! Our donate page has some other ways to donate (PayPal, bank transfers, Flattr, digital currencies) but we’ll investigate the services that you mentioned. Thanks!
Hey Libre, I have used you for some years now. Sadly I have been shangheid into resetting my laptop. I want you back please and hopefully wit all of my files. Can you do this? Meantime here I go down loading writer. Cheers.
This is a blog post about getting new contributors into LibreOffice – not a help forum. For all help, please see: https://ask.libreoffice.org
I think this initiative is a very good idea! I shared the announcement.
Dear Libreoffice,
as a proponent of privacy and personal freedom, I am very concerned about the attached image depicting your team. I know this is a feel-good marketing meme, but I find it very improbable that at least some of the people in the picture were not somewhat, or even seriously reluctant to consent to have their picture taken and distributed on the internet. Could you confirm that all the participants in this picture were there of their own free will and consented to this image of them being distributed freely? Oftentimes, one gives consent for fear of retribution or layoff, or simply to not strain the interpersonal relationships or spark negative opinions.
Please, in the future, just send an email that invites all willing participants to the photoshoot, and gives the option to people who value their privacy to not be present, without fear of retribution.
It’s the group photo from the LibreOffice Conference in Almeria. Everyone in the photo wanted to be in it.
Please make inline math possible in LibreOffice Impress. This is the single thing that prevents academics from using it
There is a request for it: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129061
Fingers’ crossed the team heading this holds a bit more influence so that users’ needs might actually be heard.
Why do you think users’ needs are not being heard?
It’s my impression users will drive wide adoption if they are happy. Gaining new users is not bad, but failing to shed existing users is the bigger problem.
There are many threads over the years, where LO minimises legitimate requests by users as not fitting into its understanding of what the software should be about; not useful feature etc. I prefer LO and have championed its adoption among my colleagues for years, but find it problematic to use because it lacks features many people need in my situation. Features many others have also raised. Good luck with the fresh users anyway. Maybe they will enlighten the project where we seasoned and grizzled oldies have failed.
Hi Thomas, if features are lacking, it’s not because LibreOffice (which is a community of course, not a company) has “minimised” anything – it’s because we simply don’t have the resources! If more people helped our or funded developers, we’d be able to implement a lot more: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/frequently-asked-questions/#features
I love LibreOffice. Have been using it and contributing for many years. Awesome work.
I am a university doctoral dissertation editor. For the most part, here in the USA, universities specify MS Word for dissertations. So, some marketing efforts would be useful which target university administrators. All academic papers, although they do not specify an office software type, do usually require documents to be submitted in the DOC format. I would like to see a non-propitiatory format also accepted as well. The argument I’ve heard for keeping MS Office here in the USA is that it is a business standard and its use will prepare students for work in business. So, perhaps multiple marketing fronts need to be addressed to gain university support.
I forgot to mention that I did create a doctoral dissertation template for Libre Office and posted it to your template Website. So, more academic templates would also be helpful.
I removed ms office from my machine and never looked back. I’m slowly freeing myself from Microsoft bondage.
Good job so far folks and hope this is a step in the right direction, that will result in a better product.
On a sad note, I can’t believe that half of the comments here so far come from idiots that try to start fires from all sorts of small thing (a simple group photo from a conference, multi language comments, etc.)
I think this is great. This is the first time I had any idea of how anyone could get into the team to work on LibreOffice . I think it’s great that you are inviting younger people to contribute . I’m sure there are budding code writers, budding engineers, budding sales reps, budding professors, budding researchers, budding authors , budding graphic design executives out there with fresh ideas. And also people like me who have been using office software in business and personal use for many years. I don’t think I have time to be a contributor at this point, but I’ll tell you what it boils down to . Ease-of-use . It’s easy to find stuff in the menu. It’s easy to set up a page. It’s easy to copy and paste from one application to another (like from the Document Editor to a presentation or an email) and all the graphics come along correctly every time . I hope some young code writers will get in there and create functionality so good that even Microsoft will take notice! God bless you all for your generosity to the global community . Let’s all remember that the skills we have , young and old , graphics oriented and code oriented And process-oriented – come from our Creator , to whom we should be thankful .
LibreOffice should be more compatible with MS Office file types. Sometimes when you open a docx or pptx the formatting of the page is badly different. MS Office dominates this area, I tried to use Libre for some time, but the documents I recieve from other people are docx and pptx format and I got frustrated in the end had to switch.
LO compatibility with MSO is important and is being improved. Some devs or organizations are specifically dedicated to it. In each new LO version one may see some bugs fixed (but there are also regressions).
Issues are found in Bugzilla at bugs.documentfoundation.org. If someone doesn’t understand what a bug is and can’t search accordingly, help can be asked at Ask.libreoffice.org.
All well bringing “young” people into the project, but what will be their task? My major concern about LibreOffice right now, is the general lack of dedicated commitment in fixing ancient bugs and improving half implimented features. Teaching these “young” programmers the 20/80 rule by having them work on unglamorous fixes instead of flashy new features, would be great for the project and for themselves. Will this happen?
(Currently I find myself reluctant to upgrade LibreOffice to the latest version when it becomes available, because the past few years have seen such upgrades more like dumb-downing.)
Great!
I was just trying to help avoiding the nonsense comtributors/critiques who think their are more than the people you are willing to recruit (students) – which do not contribute to anything – and I get censored.
Congratulations!
The first and greatest motive not to donate to the project (at least, not from me anymore).
Here’s my contribution:
You need to rethink about the meaning of “Libre” and whether it is appropriate to keep using for the LibreOffice project.
It isn’t enought being open source and free. To offer “Libre” it’s strange you CENSORING replies that defend to ones you want to recruit (students) and keep the comments of people trying to ahow they are more important to be listened to.
After all, they are “gente grande”, or “great people”. It’s exactly the same thing as “grown ups”.
Clap, clap, clap…
I’m not sure what you mean, but we’re not “censoring” anything. Due to spam, blog comments have to be manually approved before they appear. And we’re approved yours. So we’re not censoring you.
Every free software project needs a “developer onboarding” document. Some kind of text file for new developers saying “here’s a quick overview of the architecture. If you want to add a new menu item, here’s the file(s) that define menus. If you want to do Y, that gets done by these files in this subdirectory” etc.
I think this would make a big difference. I’ve looked at libre office source in the past but given up because there was no overview or guidance for how to find anything and get started.
Telegram seems to have a high barrier of entry because of the phone number requirement. Perhaps Matrix would be a better alternative, I hear it is quite popular in the open-source community.
Hi Jack, we’ll certainly consider other platforms in future, yes – and maybe bridge them together. To get started, though, we want to keep the discussions to a single place so that they don’t fragment and we lose track of ideas/suggestions/offers of help. Thanks for understanding!
I’d love using the new release. However, it seems geared to Linux distros as well as Windows 10. Not everyone is a trained seal bending to every whim of Microsoft. I run Windows 7, but unable to even get SP1 because of the reinstall and no more Microsoft updates. I find Apache Open Office works with my limitations. Too bad Libre Open Office isn’t as flexible.
The convenience of LO – latest and older versions are available. One may find SP on the Internet and use latest LO or use older LO from https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/.
Still better than OO: https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/libreoffice/.
I am a law student that uses Libreoffice with much success for all of my assignments, but still find myself saving most of the time in the .docx format because professors complain that my submitted assignments do not always display properly in Word when they open them (and I don’t know of any that use Libreoffice or equivalents.) This will not matter in practice when I am able to simply export and submit any legal documents in PDF, but the only suggestion I would have right now for the Libreoffice devs is increase .docx compatibility. I am curious if Libreoffice can use some of the compatibility tips from OpenOffice and integrate into Libreoffice. I don’t use OpenOffice because I hate the GUI and have had problems saving documents. Libreoffice is the superior FOSS word processor, and I look forward to using it for years to come.
Hi Christian! Thanks for your feedback. The developer community is already working hard to improve .docx (and general Microsoft office) compatibility with every release. For instance, see: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.0.0/Beta1 – Search for “FILEOPEN” to see all the improvements in just one beta release. There are many, many more!
Regarding OpenOffice, its last major release was back in 2014 and it hasn’t been updated much since, just a few very minor revisions. It’s missing .docx export (OOXML) and other compatibility features, so I don’t think there’s much for LibreOffice to get here. LibreOffice is usually way further ahead in terms of compatibility, as it has been developed much more since 2014.
I have used and supported LibreOffice for many years and have helped colleagues and students install it on their machines. I consider this software a modern day wonder and would never going back to MS Office products. Apparently for some it is not perfect, but for me and my friends it is wonderful. Those people that work on the project may never know how many of us out in the world appreciate their work and skill. I wish you great success with your project.
Thanks for the kind words Todd – glad to hear you and your friends find LibreOffice useful! Please help us to spread the word 🙂