Quick report: LinuxDays and OpenAlt in Czech Republic

Want to help spread the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards? Attend a local computing event, and tell people about it! Stanislav Horáček writes about some recent events in the Czech Republic…

With our LibreOffice booth, Zdeněk Crhonek and I attended the two biggest Czech FOSS events, LinuxDays in Prague and OpenAlt in Brno. We would like to share some of what we experienced:

– as usual, generally positive feedback from users, interest in new features and what is going on

– many questions about the status of LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, the role of The Document Foundation etc.

– low awareness about LibreOffice Online; people were surprised that it is ready and that people are using it; some in interest in how to install it, others sharing experience that its deployment is too complicated

– more advanced users aren’t using LibreOffice so much, replacing it by simpler things like Markdown docs

– it’s nice that videos from the marketing team are available (about LibreOffice, join the community, new features…), showing them on the screen attracted visitors to the booth; but we’re missing a video about LibreOffice online (maybe an idea for the marketing team)

– discussion with someone from the National Technical Library in Prague (enthusiastic about FOSS, migrated client computers to Linux and LibreOffice, encouraging us to spread the word about it) and a representative of an organization trying to coordinate using FOSS in Czech municipalities (two towns running LibreOffice, with the intention to pay for some bug fixing)

– a meeting with the Slovak community (Miloš Šrámek and Andrej Kapuš) in Brno

– a meeting with the Czech localization community (Mozilla, Linux distributions), discussing mainly the possibility of a new Czech dictionary

– and a discussion with a marketing specialist who suggested ways to simplify the LibreOffice webpage (there are too many confusing subpages).

So in summary, we informed Czech FOSS people that there is active development of LibreOffice and that there is even some Czech community – thanks to organizers for the opportunity and to TDF for the support!

Thanks to Stanislav and Zdeněk for their help! Find out more: here’s the Czech LibreOffice website, Czech Ask site (for user support), and Czech mailing lists.