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Community Member Monday: Biraj Karmakar

2019-04-08

India has 23 official languages according to the country’s constitution, but over 750 other languages are spoken there as well. Today we talk to Biraj Karmakar, who helps to translate LibreOffice into Bengali, and is a passionate supporter of other free and open source software projects:

Where do you live, and can we follow you on social media or IRC?

I’m based in Kolkata, India, and I’m active on Twitter: @birajkarmakar. I always try to help people through social media. Other than that I am available on IRC (biraj) and Telegram (@birajkarmakar).

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Basically I am a professional linguist – I work from my own office. Also, I am a digital marketing consultant, helping small business to grow in online markets. Other than that I run many social entrepreneur activities like Digital Literacy for Kids and Women, and I am a pure hardcore open source supporter. I have been contributing to open source projects like Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, GNOME, SaifishOS, VLC etc from 7 years. There I generally do localisation (l10n) and community events, along with quality assurance (QA) activities.

What do you do in the LibreOffice project? What are you working on?

Basically I am the bn-IN (Bengali) locale leader in the LibreOffice project, trying to complete the pending translation. Also I have done some translation for two marketing videos. I am planning to organize one translation workshop for bn-IN language very soon. Then there’s one QA event in my list.

How did you get involved? Was it a good experience?

Actually, I knew about LibrepOffice when I started using Linux. It looked good to me because we got it free for our office-related work. As I am an open source fan, I thought: why not get involved in this project? Then a few community members introduced me to the LibreOffice community!

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

I think the LibreOffice community is growing – But we don’t have much exposure in India. It would be great if we could arrange meet-ups in India where we recruit new community members, especially in colleges and university campuses, who can help us to promote the software in India.

Thanks to Biraj for his time and contributions! Learn more about localising LibreOffice here – and, of course, there are many other ways to get involved as well!

Announcing the First Latin America LibreOffice Conference

2019-04-02

This is the first ever LibreOffice conference covering Latin America, a rapidly-growing area for free and open source software.

Berlin, April 2nd, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces the LibreOffice Latin America Conference 2019, held at the Facultad Politécnica de Universidad Nactional de Assunción (FPUNA) in Asunción, Paraguay on July 19th (Friday) and 20th (Sat).

LibreOffice Latin America Conference will be the first event gathering LibreOffice users, advocates and contributors (not only development, but also localization, PR/marketing, documentation, quality assurance, … etc.) from different countries in Latin America, to exchange and share experiences and knowledge.

An exclusive translation sprint to Guarani will be held in parallel during the event with supervision of LibreOffice volunteer developers.

During the conference, we will discuss LibreOffice related business such as supporting and training, migrating to LibreOffice and the ODF true standard format, developing, and any other community activity in Latin America. In addition, we will have guests from the core team at The Document Foundation, which is a charitable foundation and the home of LibreOffice.

“The event will be an important opportunity for the consolidation of LibreOffice and free open source software in the region, bringing experiences from other countries for discussions and software development in Latin America” commented Alcides Javier Torres Gutt, professor at FPUNA. “FPUNA is proud to host the event for the Paraguayan FOSS communities, as well as advancing in the creation of a real LibreOffice with Guarani user interface”.

“The Document Foundation is a global organization, and as such wants to tighten the relationship with local communities in areas like Latin America, where there are huge growth opportunities for free open source software. A conference is the best way of putting together LibreOffice advocates, and sharing experiences and best practices at continental level” said Italo Vignoli, Marketing and Communication specialist at the Document Foundation.

Contact the conference organizers at mail address latinoamerica@global.libreoffice.org.

libreoffice

LibreOffice at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2019

2019-04-012019-04-01

Free software projects, such as LibreOffice and GNU/Linux, are developed by communities spread across the world. Most of the work takes place online, but there are many events for developers and supporters to meet face-to-face. One such event is the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days), in Saxony, which took place this year on 16 and 17 March. And the LibreOffice community was there!

Stefan Unverricht, Thorsten Behrens and Mike Saunders had a stand with LibreOffice flyers, stickers, books and other merchandse – along with a PC to demonstrate the latest version of the suite. Of course, most Linux users are well aware of LibreOffice, but there were still various questions on these topics:

LibreOffice Online

Document compatibility

Icon themes

Localisation (including Sorbian languages)

Creating extensions

Improving documentation

In addition, Stefan, Thorsten, Mike and Katarina Behrens gave talks about LibreOffice, The Document Foundation, and EGroupware integration with LibreOffice Online. Most of the talks were in German, and you can find them – along with audio recordings – here. From the other talks, we learnt about schools in Chemnitz that use LibreOffice, along with small organisations and churches.

Thorsten summarised the event: “It was very nice, with excellent talks, and a good spirit like the Paris Open Source Summit. The venue was lovely, while the talks were well attended. We should definitely go again next year!”

LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2019

2019-03-29

Check out our regular summary of events and updates in the last month!

The next LibreOffice Conference will take place in September, in Almeria, southern Spain. Join us there and meet developers, supporters, and other fans of LibreOffice and free software! You can also give a talk or presentation – we put the call for papers online at the start of the month.

Meanwhile, The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, has a job offer: we’re looking for an Administrative Assistant. If you speak German and English, check out the details – but make sure to submit your application before April 5th!

As part of our regular “Community Member Monday” series, we talked to Dieudonne Dukuzumuremy and Tomas Kapiye about their involvement in the LibreOffice project and community. Both have spent time in Japan, and have helped with bug triaging and localisation.

During the month, there were two updates for LibreOffice: we released LibreOffice 6.2.1, the first minor release of the 6.2 family. It included over 150 bug fixes, thanks to the work of our developer community and ecosystem of certified developers. Later in the month, LibreOffice 6.2.2 was released as well.

In March we also organised two C++ workshops: the first one covered classes and arrays, while the second focused on pointers and linked lists. We’ll be running more workshops in the future, so keep following our blog to learn more!

On March 15, MITRE announced that The Document Foundation has been approved as CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a reference list of public cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with entries that describe those vulnerabilities and provide references for them.

While we’re excited about the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in Spain, we’re also looking further ahead to 2020: we put out a call for locations for that year’s conference. If you’re a passionate LibreOffice supporter and want to help organise a conference in your region, drop us a line and let us know!

Finally, the LibreOffice project is now active on Mastodon, an open source, self-hosted and federated social media platform. We’ll be posting regular updates there about LibreOffice and the community, and also some tips for using the software.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!

LibreOffice is now on Mastodon social media

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You may have seen that we have Twitter accounts for LibreOffice and The Document Foundation – and now, we’re on Mastodon too!

But what is Mastodon, you may ask? Well, it’s an open source social media platform that’s self-hosted and federated. Instead of everything being controlled by a single company, Mastodon servers are spread across the world, and anyone can create one to boost the network. We in the LibreOffice community are using the Fosstodon instance, which – as the name suggests – is oriented around free and open source software (FOSS).

Click here to follow us!

(A big thanks to the Fosstodon community for their support.)

Next C++ workshop: Pointers and Linked Lists, 28 March at 19:00 UTC

2019-03-26

Another workshop is coming up! Improve your C++ skills with the help of LibreOffice developers: we’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topics are Pointers and Linked Lists. Start by watching this presentation:

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And check out the suggested EasyHacks.

Then join us for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel on Freenode. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. See you then!