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Author: Florian Effenberger

Behind the scenes at TDF: Openness, transparency and projects

by Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of TDF

Florian Effenberger

With the second quarter being over, the longest day of the year having passed by, and summer vacation time coming up for many of us, it’s time to look back what happened at TDF the first six months of the year. With many projects, activities and developments going on, time has passed by once again at lightning speed, and I want to highlight a few of the things that happened, enabled by our invaluable volunteer contributions, our generous donors, and our wonderful and amazing community, end-users and adopters. In my capacity as Executive Director, I mostly shed a light on the administrative bits of the foundation running, and my staff colleagues will give an overview on their respective areas of working later on.

One of the most noteworthy things for sure is the publication of our annual report, which for the first time since TDF’s existance has been published in English and in German at the same time, a model we want to follow also for the upcoming years. The English version has been polished up by a designer, and will also serve as printed brochure for upcoming events and meetings.

Likewise, we have begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public, to give you an overview on how we spend donors money and what projects we invest in. Accompanied by that is the publication of the board reports on the various area of our project.

Staff-wise, I am very happy that since spring of 2015, Italo Vignoli has been contracted by TDF for marketing and PR, a role he has been filling on a volunteer basis for some time already. Supported by a future marketing intern, Italo will work on press releases in joint cooperation with the community, regular marketing calls and a TDF merchandising online store.

A lot of other projects have been prepared behind the scenes, like our tenders on MozTrap and on LibreOffice UX, where we’re working hard on making them a success just like last year’s Android tender.

Community-Meeting in Essen
Community-Meeting in Essen

On the foundation side, we now have 204 members and even more contributors around the globe. Being a Bavarian, one thing that makes me particulary proud is of course that we welcomed the city of Munich in our Advisory Board early this year.

There’s a lot of things cooking at TDF, and the second half of the year will be at least as exciting as the first one. With the LibreOffice Conference coming up in Denmark, the certification program growing strong and our grant request page online for community proposals, I’m more than excited to see what projects, ideas and new things come up at TDF the next weeks and months.

One of my personal tasks for the rest of the year is to engage stronger again in my native language community. We recently had an exciting community meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, where we also had a chance to exchange thoughts and views with the Italian community, represented by Italo Vignoli. The German community has traditionally been a strong one, so 18 people in total found their way to the meeting. With the setup of regular German community phone conferences, including one dedicated call for the marketing of LibreOffice 5.0, we will work on getting more contributors in and engage in local marketing of LibreOffice – the best free office suite and one incredibly exciting community!

TDF Internship Opening (#201505-01) – Marketing & PR

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Marketing & PR Intern

to start work as soon as possible.

The role, which is scheduled for 10 hours a week and an internship time of 3 months, includes amongst other items:

Public Relations Responsibilities

  • Assist with building and maintaining media lists for different geographies
  • Assist with developing, drafting, writing and distributing press releases and other PR materials such as backgrounders and newsletters
  • Assist with media relations, including pitching, researching and scheduling interviews if needed
  • Assist with collection of pictures of project members, free software events, hackfests, and conferences
  • Assist with building and maintaining relationships with relevant media
  • Assist with following-up with members of the media to ensure publication
  • Assist with tracking of press coverage, and creating monthly clipping reports
  • Assist with proofing written materials for style, grammar, etc.

Social Media Responsibilities

  • Assist with drafting and posting tweets and posts on social media
  • Assist with writing and editing blog posts and website articles

Marketing Responsibilities

  • Assist with updating a global calendar of events
  • Assist with researching industry trends and updating marketing data
  • Assist with the development of infographics and other marketing visuals

The role requires the following skills:

Essential

  • Excellent communication skills, written, verbal and interpersonal
  • Good understanding of the free software environment and culture
  • Creativity, and ability to work on your own and meet deadlines
  • Good research and internet skills, good teamwork
  • Fluent in spoken and written English (fluency in other languages is desirable but not mandatory)

Desirable

  • Previous marketing, fundraising or communication experience
  • Experience of updating web pages using an open source CMS
  • Knowledge of graphic and desktop publishing software
  • Knowledge of international environments, willingness to travel

TDF looks for a bright and enthusiastic individual seeking to gain an insight into marketing of open source software through one of the leading international free software foundations. You will provide valuable support to a small and dynamic team and will be comfortable carrying out different tasks – according to your seniority – as part of a team. As a confident communicator, you will be happy to liaise with supporters and individuals, and will use your creativity to help with marketing activities.

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place between 1400 and 1600 UTC once per week). Applicants are also expected to be available at least two days per week.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The internship offered is time-limited, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term employment or contractual relationship. Work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than June 22nd, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by July 20th, 2015 your application could not be considered.

Tender to develop and incorporate usability metrics collection for LibreOffice (#201502-02)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

develop and incorporate usability metrics collection for LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible.

In order to improve the user interface, human interaction and usability of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement a usability metrics collection feature to be incorporated into the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions of the free office suite. The project consists of:

  1. planning and conception of features and clicks to track in close contact with our UX team, with preselection and prioritization of the features
  2. installation and configuration of a server part within TDF’s infrastructure, which is based on Mozilla’s UITelemetry (see and http://bwinton.github.io/d3Experiments/contextmenu.html for further details) and defines the format for the client part
  3. a client part, that not only counts how often features have been used, but also provides further metrics; some samples of items that need tracking are
    1. the location of the click action in the menu, as sometimes duplicates exist
    2. which context menu was used
    3. whether a certain feature was invoked by a single click, by click and hold, by a drop down click or by a multi click
    4. from which application clicking on the close document/window ‘X’ (.CloseDoc) and close application ‘X’ (.Quit) occurs
    5. whether the user used the enter key, mouse click or an accelerator to open a menu item
    6. how the app was opened (via command line, start menu, start center, or by opening a document)
    7. in which toolbar a button was clicked, as some buttons are in multiple toolbars, and users can add buttons to toolbars individually
    8. which slide transitions and object animations are used most in Impress
    9. the concrete action/command sequence: which action was used by the user, and which was the next action used after that (e.g. inserting an image and then adding a caption)
    10. which menu bar keystroke sequences are used (e.g. Alt+F + O)
    11. which icon theme, font list and theme name the user has active

      Work on the client part also involves storing collected metrics data locally in the user profile with transmission to the server part when connectivity is in place.
  4. an opt-in mechanism for the client part, so users have to actively enable the feature before any data is collected and transferred

With this feature, TDF – amongst other improvements – aims to:

  • improve the menus, toolbars and the sidebar
  • show the most popular inserted special characters for use in a future drop down
  • show the most popular bullet/numbering styles for use in a future drop down

Work is to be carried out in the source code of the current master branch of LibreOffice, as available in our git repository at http://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/libreoffice/core.git

Required Skills

Programming Languages

  • C++ for the LibreOffice client part
  • knowledge about Mozilla’s UITelemetry for the server part

Other Skills

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Companies and individuals applying can be located anywhere in the world.

Bids on individual work packages (#1-#4) are welcome.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than April 1, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by April 30, 2015 should consider that their application, after careful review, could not be considered.

Tender to develop and incorporate multi-language support for UI and test cases within Moztrap (#201502-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

develop and incorporate multi-language support for UI and test cases within Moztrap

to start work as soon as possible.

TDF currently plans to invest in expanding the capabilities of its test case management system (Moztrap). TDF’s instance of Moztrap, running MySQL as database backend, is currently only available in one language (English). In order to add more use cases and to incorporate more of our international community in testing, TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, expand the capabilities of Moztrap to allow its international community to:

  1. ability to switch language of the UI (or make the UI localizable)
  2. ability to manage test cases in several languages (including complex scripts and RTL)
  3. ability to create runs in several languages (including complex scripts and RTL)

Note: TDF is not asking for the translation itself, only to add the ability for others to translate and add to native language instances of Moztrap.

Required Skills

Programming Languages

  1. Python
  2. Django

Other Skills

  1. English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)
  2. Experience with the MozTrap source code ) and its dependencies ) recommended
  3. Connection to the up-stream MozTrap project, to provide a reasonable assurance that the work will be folded-back into the up-stream project

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

For more information about TDF’s Moztrap please visit
To visit our current running instance of Moztrap please visit http://manual-test.libreoffice.org/results/runs/
To see our current Moztrap code, plugins and fixes please visit

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including company presentation, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than March 15, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by April 15, 2015 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Behind the scenes at TDF: Infrastructure

With the beginning of 2015, a new year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, we today finish our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions!

I’m Alexander Werner and I am responsible for the infrastructure of The Document Foundation on a contracted basis since March 2014. I have been with the project since its foundation in 2012, and been a longtime supporter of free and open source software. As a volunteer I helped setting up and maintaining our first server and optimizing it to handle the load of the first days.
The infrastructure is one of the most important things The Document Foundation provides for the community. As long as every part is working as expected, it is basically invisible. It is my job to make sure that this is always the case, mostly by orchestrating the different services on our growing number of virtual machines.

When the LibreOffice fork began, we started with only one server where all services were located – mailing lists, both private and public, website, mirror management, wiki and many more. As time went by, this server survived its first slashdot, but soon it became clear that more power was needed. So our infrastructure started growing organically as more and more servers were added. Our admins specialized on different parts of the infrastructure, while the whole configuration was centrally documented in a single ODT file.

It soon became clear that this was not a viable solution – our quest for infra 2.0, as we internally call it, began. The admin team worked under fast escalating load while looking for ways to optimize resource usage, inclusion of new volunteers, configuration documentation and management. Also high availablility of services became increasingly important. In our sparse free time we started creating concepts, tested HA with DRBD, Pacemaker and Heartbeat, evaluated different solutions for centralized documentation and started using tools for centralized configuration management.

It soon became clear that we needed more flexibility for working HA with the solution described above, so as interim solution we started virtualizing services first in paravirtualized guests with LXC and then switched to fully virtualized guests with KVM. For infrastructure documentation I suggested to use the documentation generator Sphinx. The source files for the documentation – human readable RST text files – are located in a git repository, and the online documentation is automatically updated on every push. For configuration management and deployment, I eventually stumbled upon SaltStack.

My daily work consists of working on various small recurring tasks such as helping people with mailing list troubles, adding and removing mirrors in MirrorBrain, installing updates and doing necessary reboots as well as handling unexpected incidents such as the Heartbleed bug.

In spring I started working on our Salt states, made them more reliable and made sure that all user accounts are now managed by Salt. I have setup a new virtualization host with VMs for Gerrit, Jenkins, Bugzilla and Plone. Apart from that I worked on improving the documentation of our services, looking for undocumented and unused services.

I also worked on our AskBot setup. While having set up the initial AskLibO instance, it was decided to contract Evgeny Fadeev, the primary developer of AskBot, to develop additional features needed by our community, which will then be made available upstream again. Despite that, I also did some changes such as enabling the newly-developed multilanguage support, fixed template bugs and administered the list of moderators.

Except for my ongoing work to improve the Salt states and adding more not yet managed servers to our Salt infrastructure, I also continued to concatenate various documentation sources into our centralized repository.

I also worked on a download counter that will be useful to track all our downloads by language, location, version and operating system.

But the most interesting, time consuming and fascinating part of my work was the planning, testing and setup of our new cluster/cloud infrastructure. As it was decided to virtualize all of our services, I looked for a solution that is easy to manage and maintain but provides powerful tools for easily creating highly available services.

After quite some time of evaluating I decided to go for oVirt – a KVM-based virtualization solution that provides a nice out-of-the-box experience, the simplicity of its setup was worlds apart from other solutions. It is also possible to provide fully high available services with only two nodes by having the management engine run as VM on the platform.

During the time of evaluation I also had contact to hardware suppliers and hosters, and after a good offer from manitu we decided to host our new platform on two large, dedicated servers, each with 256 GB RAM and 64 CPU cores. Until the end of the year, over 20 virtual machines were migrated and a third node was ordered that will be used primarily for crash testing and to increase the stability of the platform even more.

If you are interested in learning more about our infrastructure or helping out, consider subscribing to the website mailing list, where infra calls are announced or write a mail to alex@documentfoundation.org

Behind the scenes at TDF: Executive Director

With the beginning of 2015, a new year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, we continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements in 2014 with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions!

I’m Florian, and I live in the very southern part of Bavaria in Germany, 100 km southwest of Munich, near the border to Austria and Switzerland – a beautiful place to be. 😉

Today, I’d like to shed a light on my role as Executive Director, a fulltime position which I have held since last March. With TDF having grown over the past years in terms of contributions, projects, ideas, staff and donations, my role as Executive Director is, in a nutshell, to keep everything together and have “the show running”, working for the Board of Directors and with the Membership Committee,floeff2012_400x400 and all the other wonderful volunteers, contributors and staff members like Sophie, Italo, Christian, Robinson and Alex.

Having worked intensively on the statutes and the initial setup of TDF, the first part of my role is taking care of many administrative, legal and tax bits, removing that burden from the board to give them more time for strategy and other items. This work reaches from working closely with our accountant, tax advisor, payroll provider and legal counsel, to dealing with trademark requests, protection of domain names, checking and payment of invoices, and reviewing contracts and insurances, making proposals for the investment of our capital stock and other funds, and of course answering questions on details of the statutes and other parameters of the German “Stiftung”.

The second part of my role is handling the daily operations, which includes replying to and distribution of all sorts of inquiries and requests, be it formal letters, user inquiries and, together with other TDF spokespeople, a variety of press and media inquiries. The daily operations also involve monitoring the budget, organizing our internal file storage, preparing presentations for the annual board meetings, participating in and proposing agenda items for the biweekly phone conferences, handling our donation mechanisms, bank accounts and donation confirmations, monitoring deadlines and working on relations to our Advisory Board. When a new Board of Directors or Membership Committee is elected, or we have new staff members, I have the honour of introducing them to our internal workflow and our entity.

The most exciting part of my job surely is working with our staff in various projects, and the coordination of tasks, deadlines, priorities. As Executive Director, I am responsible for oversight of all budget items and projects TDF is carrying out. At the end of 2013 we have switched to Redmine for project management – started out of the infrastructure team’s needs, it has become an important tool for task and project handling in some non-development parts of LibreOffice. In addition to that, we are running weekly team calls with our staff members, have slots reserved for weekly one-on-one calls, and meet in IRC regularly to discuss current projects and challenges. Every once in a while we also have in-person meetings, mostly during LibreOffice Conferences and FOSDEM. Being responsible for that part of the foundation also involved handling tender processes, job openings and talking to candidates who apply for a job.

We do have a couple of recurring projects, like gradually improving our AskBot instance or writing our formal annual report, but there’s also individual items, like the certification program, the Android tender and the Bugzilla migration.

Should I find some spare time during the weekends, I also like hacking around on our infrastructure, especially our e-mail system and our Redmine instance, and try to join our admin phone calls and infra in-person meetings when possible. Having been a part of the German community for many years, I also try to regularly organize community meetings and phone conferences.

Last but not least, every once in a while I give a presentation, staff a booth at an event, and sometimes I even make it to a magazine or try to say some wise words in a podcast or a lecture. 😉

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