Open documents formats and LibreOffice at FISL 14

By Gustavo Pacheco

The 14^th edition of the International Forum on Free Software FISL 14, from July 3^rd to 6^th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will carry several LibreOffice and OpenDocument Formats (ODF) activities. This year, the good news are the participation of Italo Vignoli (Italy) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Germany) who will talk on the adoption of open standards and free software, respectively. Italo will present a lecture on LibreOffice: the History and A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards. Bjoern will conduct the LibreOffice Workshop and will give the lecture LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved and LibreOffice – Continuous community integration.

The Brazilian LibreOffice community will also be in FISL 14. Klaibson Ribeiro will talk about LibreLogo early in Wednesday 3^rd, a new feature included in LibreOffice 4 focusing beguinners-level programming teaching. In the afternoon we will run the panel The importance of of the open source public legal frameworks for the ODF ecosystem, where we will discuss the achievements with existing the open document formats bills, the challenge of the execution and maintenance of these regulations and the strategies for the adoption in administrations. On Friday, July 5^th Olivier Hallot will run the workshop Modifying the LibreOffice Interface, and will present the development of the new dialog structures of LibreOffice, an old demand from the LibreOffice community. In the afternoon, Eliane Domingos will coordinate the LibreOffice Community Meeting where José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza will present their experience after one year hacking LibreOffice coding. At the end of the day the lecture The Rio Grande do Sul State Migration to Open Document Formats will show the ODF adoption case in the State Cabinet office.

For more details, please visit the official FISL page and register yourself for these full days of knowledge and collaboration!
Wednesday July 3^rd
11:00 – 12:00

Room P11

Lecture – LibreLogo – See how easy is to start programming

Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges

The Logo programming language, created in the 60’s to help teaching programming by moving a small tortoise in the screen with the command line, will be presented. LibreLogo is an implementation of the Logo programming language inside LibreOffice Writer 4.0. We will show examples on how simple it is to start to program, and how to teach kids, teens and not so young people.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 40T – GNU

Panel – Importance of open documents format public regulation for the ODF ecosystem.

Antonio Augusto Ribeiro Guimarães, Gustavo Pacheco, Italo Vignoli, Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges, Vitorio Furusho

In the recent years, the regulation of the preferred use of open document formats for interoperability, specially with respect to the ODF standard, has been a constant issue for IT managers. The goal of this activity is to present and debate with Brazilian and foreign representatives, the challenges of the legal regulation of open formats.

16:00 – 17:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved

Bjoern Michaelsen

LibreOffice is one of the biggest and most important open source projects. Still we actively encourage volunteers to get involved. This talk presents possible entry points for a newcomer to get started and explains how the project takes effort to make your first contribution into the product less intimidating. Building on that, this talk will also showcase what some volunteers managed to archive and finally present you a set of opportunities to easily make your first contribution.
Thursday July 4^th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – LibreOffice Workshop

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice workshop will be a hands-on workshop, covering these topics, depending on interest in the audience: – Building LibreOffice on Linux – running test suites – finding and fixing EasyHacks – testing developer builds – using gerrit.libreoffice.org and its build bots – tinderbox.libreoffice.org – bug triage – regression hunting with LibreOffice bibisect (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Bibisect) – whatever LibreOffice development topics come up during the session.

15:00 – 16:00, Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice: the History

Italo Vignoli

The birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, and the growth of the project during the first three years: the new governance model, the development strategy through the numbers and the new features, and the future of the free office suite.
Friday July 5^th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – Modifying the interface of LibreOffice

Olivier Hallot

In this workshop we will show how to transform the decade-old LibreOffice dialogs into a new and modern open source based on GTK + Glade technology. It will also be a hands-on session for developers with abilities to program in C++ and some knowledge of LibreOffice. We aim to motivate hackers to work on the remaining dialogs that are still available for modernization.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 41A – Tux

Lecture – A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards

Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation has developed a reference protocol to ease migrations to free software and open document standards, targeted to enterprises and organizations, which has been thoroughly tested in Italy for the migration of Regione Umbria (Italia) to LibreOffice.

16:00 – 18:00

Room 701

Community Meeting – LibreOffice and Brazil, passion really matters.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa, José Guilherme Vanz, Marcos Paulo de Souza

Brazil has one of the largest LibreOffice user base. Under the coordination of the new developers generation, the Community Meeting of LibreOffice will present the landmark achievements in almost 3 years of existence. Besides the development, we will discuss other important activities of the project.

18:00 – 19:00

Room 41C

Lecture – Migration to open document formats in the Rio Grande do Sul State Administration

Rogério Alves

We will present the implementation case of LibreOffice as standard office suite inside the Cabinet Office to the ITC managers – ITC Forum.
Saturday July 6^th
14:00 – 15:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice – Continuous community integration

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice has seen a tremendous growth since it was started 2 1/2 years ago, especially in the number of unaffiliated volunteer contributors. This growth came with a constant challenge to (re-)evaluate the communication and coordination means of the project. This talk gives an insight in how coordination in such a massive and distributed project works, but also tries to give some cautious hints what parts of that might apply to smaller projects.