Author: Italo Vignoli

March 8 is the International Women’s Day. The theme for 2016 is “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality”.

The Document Foundation has 210 members, but only 20 are women: Belinda Dibra (Albania), Christina Roßmanith (Germany), Eliane Domingos de Sousa (Brasil), Ellen Pape (Germany), Gülşah Köse (Turkey), Irmhild Rogalla (Germany), Jacqueline Rahemipour (Germany), Jean Hollis Weber (Australia), Katarina Behrens (Czech Republic, living in Germany), Linda Martinez (Venezuela), Marina Latini (Italy), Pallavi Jadhav (India), Priyanka Gaikwad (India), Rajashri Bhat Udhoji (India), Regina Henschel (Germany), Sigrid Carrera (Germany), Sonia Montegiove (Italy), Sophie Gautier (France), Surbhi Tongia (India) and Vinaya Mandke (India).

Marina Latini has recently been elected to the Board of Directors, and is the current ChairWoman of the Board of Directors.

Women active in the LibreOffice and Document Liberation communities are definitely more than 20. They should apply for membership, not only to be recognized for their contributions, but also to elect and be elected to the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee.

They can find the application form on the website: http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/members/application/.

LibreOffice has been exhibiting at Didacta, a large event focused on the education – schools and universities – environment, from February 16 to February 20, 2016, in Koeln (Germany). Booth was attended by Ellen and Walter Pape, and Thomas Krumbein during the week, plus Andreas Mantke on Saturday. Volunteers have answered individual questions (often about compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice) and have, when it came up, mentioned Libre Logo, Dmaths and the export as a Hybrid PDF.

LibreOffice was generally very well received, and volunteers were often addressed as “Nice that you exist”. The number of LibreOffice installations in education and in the private sector seems to have increased substantially in the last two years (at least, compared to Didacta 2014 in Stuttgart). Relevant people talked, for example, of a 30% increase in schools in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia ).

In a tour around the fair one could see the wide range of educational materials about MS Office, quite often in combination with hardware. All (electronic) whiteboards are equipped with MS Windows and MS Office. For almost every profession there are countless textbooks / brochures in combination with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (for example, “Office Organization with Word 2013”). We still need to do a huge effort to raise the awareness and grow the market share of LibreOffice in the educational market.