We announced LibreOffice 5.3 one week ago, and a lot has happened in the meantime! Here’s a summary of downloads, web page views, social media activity and other statistics. We’ve also compared these to the LibreOffice 5.2 first week stats to see how the project and community is progressing…
410,472 downloads of LibreOffice 5.3
This is a 32% increase over the first week of LibreOffice 5.2 – and note that it only includes downloads from our servers and mirrors, and not other sources (such as Linux distribution package repositories).
378,719 unique visitors to our website
Here we have a major 77% increase over the same period for the last release. In addition, there were 834,959 page views.
3,293 donations to The Document Foundation
Donations help our project and community in many ways – infrastructure, documentation, events, marketing, and more. Compared to the first week of LibreOffice 5.2, the number of donations increased by 79%.
More big growth here – the videos for LibreOffice 5.2 had 37,252 views in comparison, so this is a 109% increase. A lot of this growth can be attributed to the many news articles on the web that embedded the videos for readers to watch.
Our Facebook community is growing steadily, and here we see a 21% increase over the same statistic for LibreOffice 5.2. The announcement was liked by 851 people and shared 213 times. Meanwhile, our Google+ post received 229 likes (up from 115 for the previous version).
So there’s plenty to be happy about, but there are some areas where we can improve as well:
This is a 42% decrease compared to the tweet for LibreOffice 5.2. There are many possible reasons for this decrease, some out of our control, but we’ll revise our strategy for the next release to ensure that the Twittersphere keeps talking about us. Similarly, Reddit activity around the release wasn’t quite as strong this time: links to the LibreOffice 5.3 announcement on the blog received 486 upvotes, compared to 632 for last time, so that’s something to work on as well.
But on the whole, we can see that the project and community is growing well. Thanks to everyone who helped out with marketing, promotion and social media activity around the release!
LibreOffice developers, testers, translators and documentation authors are working hard on LibreOffice 5.3, which is due for release in early February. One contributor to the project, Tamás Bunth, has been helping to improve Base, the database front-end of the suite. We caught up with him to ask how he got involved with LibreOffice and what the community is like…
Where do you live, and are you active on IRC channels or social media?
I’m Hungarian, and I live in Budapest. My IRC nickname is Wastack (the name comes from the game Heroes of Might and Magic, one of my favourite games from childhood – Wastack is a barbarian hero). I’m on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/btomi96.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I did some work for Libreoffice as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student last year. In the future I’ll contribute in my spare time.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
One of my roommates in my student hostel suggested that we should try GSoC. I was searching for an end user application written in Java or C++, since these are the languages I’m comfortable with. As I looked at the Easy Hacks I realised that I may be able to solve some of these, and the developer community was helpful as well.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
My GSoC project was to upgrade the internal Firebird database management system, which is used by LibreOffice Base, and solve related bugs, which makes Firebird an experimental feature. Therefore, I got to know the drivers in some detail, and I think I’ll stick to this area in the future.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
When I first looked at the C++ code in the repository, it was scary, since even a simple string is called OUString. After that I found some UNO interfaces, and I really don’t know what was going on there. Of course, after some time and guidance from my mentor things got much clearer.
Which is your preferred text editor – and why?
Vim is my favourite. Well, I don’t now many other editors, but Vim is highly customisable. I like the recording feature too.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
I am a 2nd year Bachelor of Science student of Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In my free time I go rowing. This year I got 4th place on the National Championship of Hungary in eights crew. I’ve achieved two first places there, but I’ve never been in an international race. It is one of my future goals.
Any other hobbies or projects you’re working on?
When I still have some free time, I like writing little computer games. I started with a simple snake game using Flash several years ago, which was followed by a Tetris with Java Swing and a multiplayer Tron game using TCP (still Java). Currently, I have an incomplete project of a browser game, where you have to move simultaneously with figures on a map. It is written in JavaScript, with Node.js on the server side.
Thanks Tamás! And thanks to everyone else who’s working on making LibreOffice 5.3 the best release yet. If you’re reading this and want to join a friendly and busy community promoting open standards and document liberation, get involved!
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:
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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.
