LibreOffice Community at FrOSCon 2019

LibreOffice development takes place mostly via the internet: volunteers, certified developers and other community members collaborate on programming, design, quality assurance, documentation and other tasks. But we also like to meet up in person, to share information, bring new people into the project, and have fun!

So on the weekend of 10 and 11 August, we attended FrOSCon 2019 in Sankt Augustin, a town just outside Bonn, Germany. FrOSCon is one of the largest free and open source software (FOSS) conferences in the country, with around 2,000 attendees. Most of the visitors know about FOSS already, but some had only learnt about it recently, and were eager to discover more.

Gerrit Großkopf, Uwe Altmann, Stefan Unverricht and Mike Saunders from the German-speaking LibreOffice community had a stand with flyers, stickers and a computer demonstrating LibreOffice 6.3 and LibreOffice Online. Indeed, many visitors to the stand had no idea that LibreOffice Online existed, and were eager to try it out on their own infrastructure.

Other common topics at the stand included LibreLogo, macros, mail merge and other features in the suite. We even had a couple of visitors who demonstrated minor bugs that they’d found in the software, which have been useful for creating bug reports.

In addition to helping with the stand, Stefan gave a lecture about “LibreOffice Online in EGroupware” (German) – the video is available at media.ccc.de. Stefan also translated the slides into English and linked them in the lecture program. The presentation slides are supplemented by web links, and some screenshots of the LibreOffice Online and EGroupware integration.

Overall, it was great to meet so many passionate and dedicated FOSS fans, and we hope we’ve encouraged them to take part in the LibreOffice community. If you’re reading this and would like to organise (or attend) an event near you, drop us a line on our marketing mailing list and we’ll get you started!