Annual Report: LibreOffice Conference 2021
The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. This year, it took place online once again.
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Normally, the conference takes place at a different venue each year, to reflect the international and diverse LibreOffice community. For instance, in 2019 we were in Almeria, in 2018 in Tirana, and in 2017 in Rome. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, though, we decided to move the conference online in 2020. This wasn’t an easy decision, as face-to-face meetups are important for free and open source software projects, but we focused on making it work.
We faced the same situation in 2021: ideally, we would have had an in-person conference, but uncertainty surrounding travel restrictions and containment measures means that we decided to move the conference online for another year.
The conference took place from 23 – 25 September, with sessions usually running from 10:00 to 16:00 (UTC). We created multiple Jitsi “rooms” for the various talks and presentations, along with extra channels for social interaction and general chit-chat via IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Although the conference was online, some members of the German community met in-person in Hamburg.
Here’s a video of the opening session (also available on PeerTube):
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Conference Tracks
Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, OpenDocument Format, Quality Assurance, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of the software and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.
On the final day, the conference wrapped up with a closing session, headed by TDF’s Chairman, Lothar Becker. He thanked the presenters and all attendees for their support and contributions to the conference.
Sponsoring and merchandise
The event was sponsored by Collabora, allotropia, the Linux Professional Institute, Omnis Private & Hybrid Cloud, and Carbone.io. Conference merchandise was provided by FreeWear, a company that specialises in clothing items and other merchandise for free and open source software projects.
Full Programme
Full details about the event are available on the main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. Videos from most of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel, and on PeerTube:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Conference in 2022
At the time of writing, we are hoping to organise an in-person conference in northern Italy, in late September. We will post updates on this blog as we get closer to the event.