Author: Italo Vignoli

In the first quarter of 2016 a lot of work has been carried out by the community. On the events side, FOSDEM gathered several LibreOffice members together, and a face-to-face meeting with the Pootle team took place to discuss further fixes and enhancements needed by our localization team. In the meantime, the board has approved the budget to implement those features and work is being carried out.

The German community went to the DIDACTA trade fair (and wrote a nice report in several languages) and also attended the full week at CeBIT.

Guess what? Our Japanese team organized 14 events since the beginning of the year – kudos to them for their energy, enthusiasm and dedication! The Indian team also organized four LibreOffice meetups since January where localisation (l10n) for Garhwali and Angika began during one of them. One of the meetups was a hackathon dedicated to l10n QA. Don’t hesitate to subscribe to the LibreIndia Facebook page, as each event is announced and reported there.

And there is much more to report on what’s happening this quarter, like the hackfests in Ankara (Turkey) and the LibreOffice summit in the city of Las Palmas (Spain). I’m so happy to see the local communities invested in so many LibreOffice events.

Do not forget to check regularly the LibreOffice conference site; the local Czech team is working hard already to prepare everything, and a lot of information will be added to the site in the coming days. There is also the call for papers – submit your idea before July 15th!

On the l10n activities, LibreOffice 5.1 brought a bunch of modifications and several new strings to translate. But there will be more for the next release, 5.2, where a lot of help articles have been added or updated. A new project has been added to Pootle: now there is also the LibreOffice Online project, the newborn baby who has few new strings of its own.

Before going into the details of the marketing activities, The Document Foundation (TDF) is proud to announce that Mike Saunders was hired as Marketing Assistant in mid-February. Mike is known for the famous feature videos he made for LibreOffice 5.1, and he has kicked off the Month of LibreOffice Contribution in May, amongst many other projects. Welcome on board, Mike!

Paraphrasing a famous song, marketing at The Document Foundation is “the activity that never sleeps…”. The first quarter is one of the busiest, as we have FOSDEM and one major release happening between the end of January and mid February, followed by several minor releases – to keep up momentum – and a few events, including CeBIT in Germany.

FOSDEM 2016 was a large success for LibreOffice, thanks to the strategic positioning of the booth in the main lobby of building K, where most of the large projects are represented. It was the first time for TDF in the “kernel” of the exhibition, and it showed up. On Saturday, January 30, the project registered more visitors than during the entire FOSDEM 2015 (and almost as many on Sunday, January 31).

On Saturday, January 30, TDF developers were also on stage during the Open Document Editors DevRoom, with over 20 different talks about the upcoming LibreOffice 5.1 release, and related topics.

During FOSDEM, the certification committee also hosted several sessions, mostly via remote connections, to evaluate five candidates: one from Spain: Pasqual Milvaques, one from Taiwan: Frankling Weng, and 3 from Italy: Paolo Dongilli, Antonio Faccioli and Diego Maniacco.

One week after FOSDEM, the marketing team coordinated the announcement of LibreOffice 5.1 on Wednesday, February 10. During Monday and Tuesday, I hosted five different conference calls, with journalists from Europe and the United States. Thanks to this effort, the media coverage has been excellent, with hundreds of positive articles worldwide.

One year later, the improvements to the distribution of press releases based on specific features of phpList are showing up, with an average hit rate often higher than 30%. Thanks to phpList for offering us a free account.

In March, the marketing team has focused on two different projects: CeBIT in Hannover, the largest high tech trade show in Germany, and TDF 2015 Annual Report, which is the most important document produced by the project during the year.

CeBIT is the largest German trade show, and most visitors already know the office suite or even use it. Even if the interest has been lower than in the past, several project members – Thorsten Behrens, Thomas Krumbein and myself – have had the opportunity to present LibreOffice at the open source area, thanks to the collaboration with CIB.

TDF’s 2015 Annual Report will be released during the second quarter, and will provide an overview of what has been achieved by the project at large – i.e. including native language projects at local level – in each area.

Starting from May, we will be organizing a monthly PR call, to involve native language communities in marketing activities. In addition, starting from July, we will also organize online webinars to share competences in marketing and communications with local communities. During these webinars, we will also cover the LibreOffice migration protocol.