LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world, working on code, documentation, QA, translations, marketing, infrastructure and much more. Coordinating the project’s activities is the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Let’s see what the team members do:
1. Christian Lohmaier, Release Engineer
Christian’s typical tasks include taking care of the continuous integration system (both the automation server and the build machines), managing the LibreOffice release process, handling app store updates with all the paperwork that entails, managing the technical side of language translations not only for LibreOffice, but for any translatable system we have and making sure our integration with payment platforms works smoothly. He has also been involved in creating and maintaining websites and web services.
Christian’s work is influencing the developer experience as well. In the past, LibreOffice’s Windows development setup was somewhat messy. After Christian introduced automation into the setup process with the help of WinGet scripts, there has been much less need for troubleshooting.
2. Dan Williams, Developer
Dan was involved in the Mac port back in the 2000s when LibreOffice was still called OpenOffice.org. For some months now he has been working for TDF on user interface and macOS tasks. He has done corrections to the handling of system UI themes, implemented support for special macOS keyboard shortcuts and macOS-specific menu items, fixed database links going missing from .ods files, and fixed an issue with printing notes from Impress presentations on macOS. His ongoing work includes experimenting with Qt UI on macOS and reworking the code for Notebookbar.
3. Florian Effenberger, Executive Director
Florian is one of the founders of TDF, and its Executive Director since 2014. He manages our worldwide team of 18 people, and deals with a variety of tasks in accounting, financials, taxes, budget, payroll, annual audit, banking, legal topics, employment and HR. He supports the board and the membership committee and onboards those new in office. He regularly gives presentations at events, is active in the German community and has written extensively about the tasks he is involved on our forum.
4. Guilhem Moulin, Infrastructure & Services
Guilhem is managing our servers and the approximately twenty web services needed every day by LibreOffice users and contributors. Major updates to the operating systems and the web applications require careful studying of what needs to be taken into account to ensure everything keeps operating smoothly. Often this goes into the level of studying individual code changes. Compatibility breakage has to be mitigated or at least communicated.
5. Heiko Tietze, UX Architect
Heiko is collaborating with user experience design volunteers in planning improvements to LibreOffice. Not being content with planning, he then goes and implements the proposals, either by himself or with help from others. Heiko always denies being a C++ developer yet inexplicably has over 700 LibreOffice code changes in his name. He has mentored in over a dozen Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy projects, for example in the reworking of Table Styles and UI theming. Being an active mentor means that he is doing code reviews for new developers all year round as well as inventing new easy tasks.
A recent large-scale project of his is implementing vertical tabs in dialogs.
6. Hossein Nourikhah, Developer Community Architect
Over a hundred developers get their start in LibreOffice code every year. Facing seven million lines of code can be intimidating, so we have a tradition of providing a selection of tasks we call “easy hacks“. Hossein is tending to this catalogue of beginner tasks and reviewing the submitted code changes. Whenever a new developer has issues with setting up a development environment, he jumps in to help. He is also writing developer documentation on the TDF wiki and publishing blog posts about development.
He has mentored GSoC projects such as cross platform bindings for .NET and Python code auto-completion. His recent contributions include initial support for Qt 6 UI on Windows together with Michael Weghorn, based on earlier work by Jan-Marek Glogowski.
7. Ilmari Lauhakangas, Development Marketing
Ilmari is bringing in new contributors to quality assurance, design, C++ development and documentation. In a typical year he teaches nearly 200 people about getting involved in LibreOffice. He is also triaging (and sometimes fixing) bugs, doing web development, maintaining the wiki, doing code reviews and managing internship programs.
8. Italo Vignoli, Marketing & PR
Italo Vignoli is a founding member of The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project, the Chairman Emeritus of Associazione LibreItalia, an Ambassador of Software Heritage, and a proud member of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). He is a past board member of Open Source Initiative (OSI). Italo co-leads LibreOffice marketing, PR and media relations, co-chairs the LibreOffice Certification Program, and is a spokesman for the project. He also handles advocacy and marketing activities for the Open Document Format ISO standard.
9. Jonathan Clark, Developer
For the past two years Jonathan has been working on LibreOffice features in the categories of right-to-left scripts, complex text layout and Chinese-Japanese-Korean. In addition to numerous quality of life improvements, he has implemented support for Start/End paragraph alignment while making it the default instead of Left/Right, and made the CJK text grid compatible with Microsoft Word. On the mentoring side he is constantly reviewing code submissions from newcomers and was involved in the BASIC IDE object browser GSoC project.
Jonathan is currently looking into fundamental improvements in the LibreOffice user interface.
10. Juan José González, Web Technology Engineer
As mentioned earlier, TDF hosts a rather large number of web applications, some of them created from scratch. These custom web services include the Extensions and Templates site and the Crash Report site. Juan José has been heavily involved in redesigning and maintaining these two sites. He has also worked on sites for various LibreOffice conferences, improved our localisation tooling and created tools to combat spam in our forums.
11. Michael Weghorn, Developer
TDF wants LibreOffice to be easy to use for visually impaired people, and three years ago Michael was hired to make sure we always deliver accessible software. LibreOffice has lots of variety in its content types and user interface widgets. This means that we are sometimes testing the limits of accessibility APIs, which are also different per operating system. To ensure optimal results in LibreOffice accessibility, Michael is working with developers of toolkits such as GTK and Qt, and with developers of screen-reader applications such as Orca and NVDA.
At the moment Michael is working to bring LibreOffice’s Qt user interface support to the next level and seeing how it works on Windows.
12. Mike Saunders, Marketing and Community Coordinator
Mike is a long-time Linux and free software journalist, and joined the team in 2016 to work in the areas of marketing and community outreach. He helps to maintain the LibreOffice social media channels, interacting with users to encourage them to join the project and contribute. He also interviews community members, writes blog posts, works on videos and podcasts, and organises events.
13. Neil Roberts, Developer
Neil joined the team a couple of months ago to improve the scripting and API side of LibreOffice. He has implemented a new approach for Lua UNO API bindings, added QuickJS-based JavaScript bindings together with Stephan Bergmann and made it possible to create and edit Python macros via the Macro Organizer dialog.
Neil will also be collaborating with Michael Weghorn on user interface renovation projects.
14. Olivier Hallot, Documentation Coordinator
Olivier started contributing back in the OpenOffice.org days in 2001 as part of the Brazilian community and is one of the founding members of TDF. For ten years he has been leading the documentation effort for LibreOffice. The documentation team maintains several guide books, a huge collection of help articles, wiki pages and even tooltip texts seen within LibreOffice itself. Olivier has opinions on writing good release notes and is not shy to share them!
Olivier is also fixing UI issues and making sure everything works with regards to localisation.
15. Sophie Gautier, Foundation Coordinator
Sophie has been in the LibreOffice project since the beginning (and in OpenOffice.org before that), and helps with TDF administration tasks, such as organising meetings and managing the travel refund tool. In addition, she helps to organise the yearly LibreOffice Conference, and works with the localisation communities to make LibreOffice available in as many languages as possible.
16. Stephan, Administrative Assistant
Stephan helps with administrative tasks for the foundation, such as meeting minutes, accounting reports, donation queries, travel bookings, travel expense reimbursements, ordering equipment, issuing donation receipts, payment processing, and translations.
17. Vissarion Fysikopoulos, Developer
Having started about a month ago, Vissarion will focus on taking Base to the next level. The current development plan includes finishing the new Report Builder, polishing Firebird support and adding support for SQLite.
18. Xisco Faulí, QA Engineer
Xisco did a Google Summer of Code project for LibreOffice in 2011 and joined the TDF team in 2016 to work on QA (quality assurance). At first he was triaging bugs, but gradually moved to writing automated tests. By now he has added thousands of tests. He keeps LibreOffice’s hundred external dependencies up to date, fixes critical bugs, improves graphics support, helps with the release process, is involved in reviewing security reports and handles the crash report system alongside other automated systems related to guarding the quality of the software. He also mentors GSoC projects.
As mentioned, the team is just a small part of the overall LibreOffice community. Everyone is welcome to find out what you can do for LibreOffice – to learn new skills, meet new people, and be part of a project making software used by millions of people around the world!