Author: Mike Saunders

Suraj Bhattarai, our Nepalese LibreOffice Community Liaison, writes:

We shared some positive words around the LibreOffice project, among students of IOE Purwanchal Campus enrolled in CS50x Nepal. The LibreOffice orientation was scheduled for two hours on 21st February, 2024 at the MSC special classroom of the same campus; it was a special session in the CS50x Nepal timeline.

The session that I delivered gave a general overview of the LibreOffice project, The Document Foundation, the Document Liberation Project, past activities carried out by the local Nepali community, customization tips and tricks for familiarity, and how to contribute or connect in the community.

Moreover, the session – organized for 30 CS50x Students – included a total participation of 47 people, seven of whom were Nepali Community members, six of whom were other students, and the rest were the CS50x staff. The session was primarily intended to introduce the LibreOffice suite and provide hands-on experience with it, to the newly enrolled, first-year students in the campus, who were actually enrolled for the CS50x classes.

The session had this breakdown:

• 40 mins of talks
• 30 mins of quick presentation competition using LibreOffice Impress
• 30 mins of release party cake and celebration
• And lastly, 30 mins of Plane Rush competition as a fun touch to the session

The competition was facilitated by our community volunteers, where they distributed some gifts as well. The challenge for the competition was to create a visually appealing, quick three-page presentation using LibreOffice Impress on-the-spot, in 25 minutes. All they had to do was recreate the presentation slide version of the LibreOffice university/school (English) flyer.

The gifts were LibreOffice T-shirts, water bottles, Document Liberation Project stickers, pens and more. The same gifts were distributed to winners of the Plane Rush activity as well, and some light items like stickers and pens were given to everyone present in the session.

After some hands-on experience with LibreOffice Impress, a quick survey was conducted, where 27 of the participants claimed that they tried LibreOffice for the very first time. The same survey had asked what they love about LibreOffice. And honestly, a majority of them mentioned the reasons to be: open source, free, compatible with Microsoft Office files, community driven, cross-platform, privacy, and feature-rich.

The latter half of the session was filled with fun, as we cut and shared the vanilla-flavored release party cake with everyone present in the room. The environment was really fun with flashes, noise, claps, smiles, and cameras and eyes all over the cake.

Lastly, in the sunset and the open ground, participants flew their own paper planes based on LibreOffice PaperPlaneFront.odg. The session was totally fun and a unique experience for everyone. And yes, they did collect the planes for paper recycling later on. And with this, the day, joy and celebration all came down to a happy ending with the efforst from the Nepali community.

FOSDEM is the biggest meetup of free and open source software (FOSS) developers in Europe, and takes place every year, in early February, in Brussels. And the LibreOffice project is always there!

We had a stand with merchandise, and community members were present to answer questions, provide information about new features in LibreOffice, and meet people from other FOSS projects.

Our LibreOffice pens were very popular, as were Document Liberation Project stickers and flyers. Many visitors to the stand were regular LibreOffice users and just wanted to say thank you, some buying a T-shirt or hoodie as well. We even had a couple of donations on the spot! Others asked what they can do for LibreOffice.

And here are a few photos from the event, and our community dinner. This is just the beginning though – we plan to be at many more events this year!