A new year begins, and we kick off with our first LibreOffice contributor interview of 2017. This time we’re talking to Hazel Russman who helps out with documentation and translations…
Where do you live, and are you active on social media?
I’m British and live in North London. I don’t do social media but I have a web page at www.hrussman.entadsl.com.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I’m retired. I help out the documentation team mainly as a translator and proofreader.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
I wrote a novel some years ago and used OpenOffice.org to get it into shape for self-publishing. I wanted to give something back, and the OOo site suggested that time might be more valuable than money. When LibreOffice forked off, I moved over to their team.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
I’ve done quite a bit of translation from German into English, especially for Base, which has an excellent German handbook. Until I translated it, there was hardly anything on Base in English. English is my native language, but I grew up in a German-speaking home. My parents were refugees from Hitler. I’m also quite well known on the team as a proofreader.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
Interesting and very satisfying. But I’ve never been much interested in socialising online.
Which is your preferred text editor, and why?
For plain text, I like gVim. It has all the Vim keyboard commands but also graphical controls. The best of both worlds, you might say. I do a bit of coding in my spare time and for that I use Geany. Both Vim and Geany do syntax checking, which is a great help.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
Lots of things! I have a dog who takes up a lot of my time. I am active in my local church and play the cello as part of an instrumental group attached to the church’s gospel choir. I am also quite active on Linux Questions, which is the only social networking that I can be bothered with.
Thanks Hazel! We’ll be posting more interviews over the coming weeks and months, so if you want to join the LibreOffice community, pop over to tdf.io/joinus and choose how you want to get involved. We look forward to your input and contributions!
2017 is just around the corner, so here’s a shiny calendar from The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community. Print it out, hang it on your wall, and here’s to a great 12 months ahead!
Donations to The Document Foundation help us to maintain a small team, working on various areas of the project including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. I help out with the latter, and as we come towards the end of 2016, I want to talk about some of the things I’ve been working on in the last six months. It’s been a really busy time, with a new release of LibreOffice, our conference and many other events and updates. And 2017 promises to be even better! But first, I’d like to provide a bit of background on my typical working day.
The first thing I do is catch up on discussions from the previous day. As you probably know, LibreOffice has many mailing lists covering all aspects of the project and community. I’ve signed up to “digest” subscriptions for some of them – so I get a summary at the end of each day. This is helpful for pinpointing topics of interest. Also useful are minutes from meetings, such as the design team or the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC).
Next, I check our IRC channels to see what’s going on, and what are the hot topics in the community at present. Then I’ll catch up with our social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. Sometimes there are questions from LibreOffice users that need answering, but in any case, it’s good to see what end users are talking about.
Once I’ve caught up with everything, I turn to my own email inbox in Thunderbird and look at my pending tasks. Sometimes I’ll have a bunch of smaller jobs to take care of (like proofreading and email responses), before I start working on a bigger project for the rest of the day, such as videos, interviews, blog posts, website updates and other jobs. We in the LibreOffice project use Redmine to create and track tickets for tasks that we’re working on, so that we can see how things are progressing and share ideas.
What I’ve done in the last six months
In July we were putting the finishing touches to The Document Foundation’s 2015 Annual Report, of which I wrote many sections, and I helped to translate parts of it into German. Around the same time, we were gearing up for the release of LibreOffice 5.2, so I made a technical preview video for our community, showing some of the new features to help with testing and documentation.
Following that, I produced more polished New Features videos for the world to see on release day – and in total, they received over 100,000 views. Here’s the playlist:
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.
Close to the release day, I worked with Italo Vignoli to contact journalists with information about the new version of LibreOffice, offering them to join us in press briefing calls where they can ask questions and speak to members of TDF’s Board of Directors. In addition, I worked on updates for the website, highlighting the new features with extra text and screenshots.
After LibreOffice 5.2 was released in August, we began preparations for our yearly conference, which was held in early September in Brno, Czech Republic. With some of the TDF’s marketing budget (which again, is thanks to generous donations!) I sourced some new video and audio equipment which I took to the conference. Along with various videos from the conference itself, like this wrap-up, I also made some contributor interviews which were also used in our Join the LibreOffice Community video. (And then, our community produced translations in many different languages, which I added to the videos.)
Bringing new people into the community is an important part of my role, so I worked on a redesigned Get Involved page on the LibreOffice website. (I also created a short URL for it: tdf.io/joinus.) This page makes it simpler for potential contributors to dive in to the project, in that they can simply click a topic of interest and get quick pointers on where to start.
Throughout October, I organised a series of LibreOffice Community Weeks on the blog, talking to different projects and exploring how they work. I interviewed contributors, looked at the tools that they use, and explained how to get involved, posting regular updates on social media to generate interest. In the end, we had new contributors in documentation, development and QA, so I plan to repeat these Community Weeks again next year.
November was another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions across the project with badges and barnstars. This caught the attention of the Albanian LibreOffice community, which is running its own Month of LibreOffice throughout December – we’ll post a wrap-up on this blog when it finishes!
And then there were other tasks that I worked on over the last six months, including: updated training certificates, an acknowledgement document for new developers, contributor interviews for the blog, new items on our merchandise shop, and updates to the LibreOffice subreddit.
Yes, the Month of LibreOffice has come to an end – and what a great month it was. We celebrated contributions from all over the world, in many different areas of the project: development, translations, user support, quality assurance, documentation and social media. Everyone is working hard on the LibreOffice 5.3 release – and we’re really grateful for all the effort!
You can see all the work going on in the different projects. These are contributions from our community, as we really want to show our appreciation for community members in the Month of LibreOffice, but of course there are many other people doing paid work on LibreOffice as well. Congratulations to everyone who got a badge – click the links under the names to share on social media or get an image for your blog, website or CV!
Barnstars let community members show appreciation for one another, with bronze for small jobs, silver for bigger ones, and gold for especially notable contributions. If you got a barnstar, don’t be shy and let the world know!
Here’s a chart showing the badge count throughout the 30 days. You can see that it climbed steadily, with new names being added each day. This shows how healthy and thriving the LibreOffice project is:
Finally, if you’re a LibreOffice user and this has tempted you to get involved, welcome to the project! Even if you can only spare an hour or so each week, you can really make a difference with development, design, documentation, testing, marketing and helping other users. We look forward to working with you!
