LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2021

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more!

• We started October by looking at how a LibreOffice bug can be fixed in less than eight hours! Our QA community works super hard to identify and resolve issues in the suite, and this is a great demonstration of their efforts.

• Meanwhile, we have a new LibreOffice development blog thanks to Hossein Nourikhah, who recently joined us as a Developer Community Architect. He’ll be posting regular tips and tutorials for making changes to the software’s source code, and submitting patches.

• During the month, we uploaded more videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2021. Check out the full playlist on YouTube – and we’re also adding them to PeerTube as well. Most of the videos are online now, but a few more are still to come – we’ll post updates here on the blog.

• And on the topic of the conference: although it was online again this year, due to the pandemic, the local German community in Hamburg organised a small “hybrid” event. They could meet in person, but also take part in the online sessions. Hopefully we’ll have more face-to-face meetings early next year!

• The Free Software Foundation Europe is starting a new competition: Youth Hacking 4 Freedom. This gives young people the chance to receive cash awards for participating in free software project, and to travel to Brussels to meet the other winners.

• In the middle of the month, we announced LibreOffice 7.2.2, the second bugfix release in the 7.2 family. It includes 68 bug and compatibility fixes.

• Got an idea for a great project or event that could benefit the LibreOffice community? We at The Document Foundation can give you financial support from our budget. For example, you may want to organise a localisation sprint to translate LibreOffice into your native language, or want to buy merchandise for an upcoming event. Whatever it is, if it benefits the community as a whole, we want to hear your ideas!

• As part of our regular “Community Member Monday” series, we talked to Hlompho Mota who’s working on the Sesotho LibreOffice translation project in Lesotho. He also told us about the challenges facing adoption of free and open source software in his country.

• In foundation news, we announced the upcoming election for TDF’s next Board of Directors. The nomination phase will run until November 25 – so if you’d like to nominate yourself, check out the instructions in the blog post.

• LibreOffice took part in the Google Summer of Code 2021, and in October we summarised the results. Thanks to Bayram Çiçek, Sary Nasser, Akshit Kushwaha, Balázs Sántha, Panos Korovesis, Anshu Khare and Tushar Kumar Rai for their great work!

• And finally, Rafael Lima from the Brazilian LibreOffice community is working on an extension to remove blank cells in LibreOffice Calc. It has four modes (single column, single row, blank rows and blank columns). Rafael is looking for more help to test and improve the extension, so if you find it useful, please give him a hand!

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