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Author: Mike Saunders

Community Member Monday: Vera Blagoveschenskaya

Today we’re talking to Vera from the Russian LibreOffice community, who has been especially active in our Quality Assurance (QA) project recently…

First, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Obninsk, Russia – it’s one of the major Russian science cities. You know, the first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk. At the moment I work at BaseALT as a QA engineer. I really love testing! (I’ve noticed a minor bug in LibreOffice Writer while typing these words – I will surely report it later 🙂)

I’m also mother of a teenage girl, so a lot of my spare time is dedicated to supporting her interests. Now she is really into biking and swimming, and we dream of visiting the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment? And is there anything you’d like to try in future?

I find and report bugs in Bugzilla and check fixes. In addition, I try to reproduce unconfirmed bugs and categorize them. For the future, well, it’s really hard to choose – there are so many options! But I undoubtedly would like to have more time to contribute to LibreOffice.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the
experience like?

When I started to work in BaseALT, one of the tasks was to test LibreOffice for KDE 5.
I took part in the Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2 in October 2018 and had success. I was mentioned in the November 2018 QA report; it was unexpected and very pleasant!

A bit later, Aleksei Nikiforov (who works at BaseALT as well) got involved in work and fixed some KDE 5 crashes. Now we work together, thereby continuing the tradition of contributing to LibreOffice. You know, BaseALT was formed from the ALT Linux Team, which helped to localize StarOffice a long time ago.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice?

My opinion: LibreOffice needs to be promoted more widely. Most Windows users don’t know that there is a great and free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Thanks to Vera for her time and contributions! And indeed, we in the LibreOffice project would appreciate more help spreading the word – join our marketing community today!

Bringing people together: German LibreOffice Community Meeting, May 2019

Free and open source software is all about community: meeting people, sharing knowledge and ideas, and having a good time! As you may know, LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, and every year, members of the German-speaking community meet to discuss the project’s status and future. In May, we met at Linuxhotel in Essen:

On Friday evening, we had an informal get-together with pizza and drinks. This was also an opportunity for new participants to get to know one another, while long-time LibreOffice supporters, who hadn’t met in a while, could catch up too.

The main event started on Saturday:

15 people took part, from across the LibreOffice project: developers, event organisers, infrastructure maintainers, documentation editors, and TDF team and board members. We discussed many topics, which are detailed on the pad (in German), including: the structure of the German project; the various tools that we use (and how to consolidate them); and which events we should attend in the future.

In addition, we created a list of tasks to focus on in the coming weeks and months, assigned to various members of the community. As we’re a volunteer-led project, we always appreciate help, so if you’ve seen something on the pad that piques your interest, please join our mailing list and give us a hand!

After the discussions, we relaxed with some more food, drinks and games (Linuxhotel has a dart board). On Sunday morning, before everyone left, we had a quick final round of discussion, and a summary of what we’re planning to do.

On the whole, it was a great event and reminded us that in-person meetings are important, especially for projects that normally work together over the internet. Being able to discuss ideas face-to-face is invaluable – and of course, it’s great fun too. See you next year!

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Next C++ workshop: Binary Trees, 9 May at 18:00 UTC

Boost your C++ skills with the help of LibreOffice developers! We’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topic is Binary Trees. Start by watching this presentation:

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And check out the suggested EasyHacks.

Then join us for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. See you then!

Starting today: The Month of LibreOffice, May 2019 – get cool merchandise!

LibreOffice is made by a community of developers and supporters around the world. This month, we want to say a big thanks to everyone who helps out – and encourage more people to join our friendly community as well! So how are we going to do this?

Well, everyone who contributes can claim an awesome sticker pack at the end of the month:

And even better, we’ll also choose 10 contributors at random to receive an exclusive glass LibreOffice mug:

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users: over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the office suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 6.2.3”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice!)
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting/tooting!)
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So there’s plenty to do! As the contributions come in, we’ll be updating this page every day with usernames. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks!

LibreOffice monthly recap: April 2019

Check out our regular summary of events and updates in the last month!

  • We reported back from the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2019, where the LibreOffice community had a stand with flyers, stickers and other goodies. We also held some talks about LibreOffice and The Document Foundation – it was great to meet so many passionate Free Software fans there!

  • On April 8, we had a chat with Biraj Karmakar from the Indian community. Biraj helps out with translations and QA (quality assurance) – so if you’re reading this, are based in India and want to join our project, let us know and we can put you in touch with the community there!

  • In another Community Member Monday interview, we Roman Kuznetsov from Russia told us about his experiences joining the project. “I got valuable experience communicating with a worldwide community, along with some practice in English, working in Bugzilla and making good bug reports”, he said.

  • Finally, we geared up preparations for a new Month of LibreOffice! This time, along with sticker packs for all contributions, we’ll also give out 10 awesome LibreOffice mugs to randomly selected participants at the end of the month. But how can you take part? Well, just check this blog tomorrow for all the details!

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Community Member Monday: Roman Kuznetsov

Today we’re chatting with Roman Kuznetsov, a Russian contributor to LibreOffice who helps out in QA and other areas:

Your nickname in the LibreOffice project is “Kompilainenn” – where did that come from?

Oh, it’s simple: one day I was trying to compile the Linux kernel for my old and slow PC. And I came up with my current nickname: Kompilainenn 😀

So tell us a bit about yourself – where you’re from, where you live, how to find you on social media, and what do you do in your spare time!

I’m a member of The Document Foundation from Russia, and I live in Lipetsk – it’s an industrial metallurgical city. You can find me on Telegram as @Kompilainenn, and on IRC in the channel #libreoffice-ru. I have a blog about LibreOffice in Russian: the blog has strange address with the prefix “anti”, but in reality the blog isn’t against LibreOffice 😉

I work for a large agribusiness company, as the boss of the “build cost calculation and conclusion of contracts” department. In my spare time I read books, play with my children, play computer games or walk outdoors – and of course make LibreOffice better 😉

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

At the moment I’m doing some quality assurance (QA) work – filing bug reports, retesting and sorting many old bugs. It’s huge area of activity – and also, I’ve fixed a pair of user interface bugs. I have translated my Conditional Formatting Guide into English as well.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on in the future?

First, I would like to learn C++ and I want to try to improve the management of macros in LibreOffice.

Second, there is the LibreOffice Style Guide in Russian. But it has much information about Writer styles, and very little info about styles in all another modules of LibreOffice. I want to add more info about styles for all modules, and then translate the guide to English.

Third, I want increase the number of active members in the Russian community – to involve more Russian developers in LibreOffice development. It will take a lot of work!

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the experience like?

I used OpenOffice.org from 2008, and then LibreOffice when it came to life. In 2013, I knew about the Russian forum http://forumooo.ru and created an account there.

At the end of 2014, Lera Goncharuk (aka “tagezi”) invited me to help him with translating LibreOffice’s FAQ into Russian on our wiki. And I agreed. Since then, I translate all Release Notes for new versions of LibreOffice into Russian.

Other tasks I worked on were translating the Getting Started Guide and Draw Guide. Then I began to send bug reports and some enhancements. Also, I worked on translations of Math and Impress guides. In the last year I have tried fix simple UI bugs in the source code of LibreOffice – now I have over ten simple bug fixes aready!

I got valuable experience communicating with a worldwide community, along with some practice in English, working in Bugzilla and making good bug reports. Now that I know more about how LibreOffice’s user interface is created, I like to make new dialogues in Glade and create UI mockups in Pencil.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice? What does it need most?

First, I fully agree with Khaled Hosny, who was interviewed recently. LibreOffice needs to have a more clear vision and development agenda.

Second, every month I see about 600 new bug report and only 150 bug fixes. Our project need more developers and needs to pay more attention to attracting programmers to the project.

Third, it need to have more marketing materials about LibreOffice in various world languages – things like stickers, posters, etc. People should know about alternative software in the office world.

But to finish: thanks to everyone in the LibreOffice community for their work!

And thanks to Roman for his time and contributions! Our project and community is always open to newcomers, in many areas: marketing, design, programming, documentation, QA and more. Learn new skills, meet new people and get involved today!

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