LibreOffice contributor interview: Daniel A. Rodriguez
Having concluded our video interviews from FOSDEM, we now return to our regular LibreOffice contributor interviews on the blog. Today we talk to Daniel A. Rodriguez, an Argentinian LibreOffice and Free Software supporter, who helps with marketing, translations and design.
Where do you live, and are you active on social media?
I live in Posadas, the capital of Misiones in the north-east of Argentina. Here’s my Google+ profile.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I use my spare time to contribute.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
When the LibreOffice project started (as a continuation of OpenOffice.org) I was still quite a new GNU/Linux user, but wanted to return something to the global community which had helped me many times before. So, I subscribed to mailing lists and – I don’t remember exactly how – in January 2011 I started to translate the LibreOffice website into Spanish.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
I try to stay tuned to marketing, translating press releases, design blog posts and developer blog posts. I maintain several social media profiles as “Comunidad LibreOffice Argentina”:
All of these can, I think, help to attract volunteers to the project. But we must recognize that the Spanish community is fragmented into several geographical regions. And that’s why at the end of 2016, with help from two
other community member (Adolfo Jaime Barrientos and Carlos Parra Saldivar), we started a new blog at The Document Foundation. Now it has another well known LibreOffice user and advocate: Ricardo Berlasso. The goal is to get more people participating, now and then.
Sometimes I work on ideas that others can bring into reality – such as the airport advertisement for the launch of LibreOffice 4.0, or more recently the MUFFIN illustration for the blog post in December.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice?
Being able to participate actively in an international community, with the push and motivation that revolves around LibreOffice and Free Software, was – and still is – indescribable.
What does LibreOffice need most right now?
I think that an option for automatic updates, like Firefox has for example, would be great.
Finally, what do you do when you’re not contributing to LibreOffice?
I work the whole day in a secondary school with a technical orientation. My obligations are to maintain the infrastructure on which different systems work: institutional management, Virtual Education Environment, proxy cache, DNS, among others.
Thanks Daniel! And thanks to everyone else involved in marketing and localisation of LibreOffice. If you’re reading this and want to join the friendly, worldwide LibreOffice community, get involved!