Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

Videos

The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:

I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:

After returning from FOSDEM, I also edited and uploaded LibreOffice-related presentations from the event.

Month of LibreOffice, and events

In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:

Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!

Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.

From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).

Website, blog and infrastructure

The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.

Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.

Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.

If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.

Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.

LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.

In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.

Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:

So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!