Author: Mike Saunders

Today we’re talking to Stanislaus J. Pinasthika from the Indonesian LibreOffice community. He has recently become a member of The Document Foundation, helping to guide the LibreOffice project and community…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

Let me tell you a story: Jember was a quiet city. No many cafes at the time. One day, in the beautiful morning, a boy was born. He was named Stanislaus Jiwandana Pinasthika – but his parents called typically called him Stanis. Twenty two years later, this boy graduated from the Information Systems Department, Faculty of Computer Science, at the University of Jember…

Today, I am struggling to start my masters degree in Computer Science at Gadjah Mada University. I like to design things using Inkscape, such as vector graphics, cartoons etc. You can see my work here. But I also love to contribute to open source projects.

For instance, I made a Linux Community in Jember with my friends – Sofyan Sugianto is one of them. He is also a member of TDF. My contributions to LibreOffice started with translating – at the time still using Pootle. Now, I am glad to be a proud member of TDF and the LibreOffice Quality Assurance (QA) team.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

After one year of contributing to translations and joining the QA team, Ahmad Haris suggested that all of the Indonesian contributors fill in the membership application form. I thought: becoming a TDF member is more challenging for me, so I took the chance. I am very grateful that my application has been accepted.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

In the QA community, we make sure that all reports are clarified as bugs or not, so that these reports help to improve the quality of LibreOffice. I also give a hand with translating into Bahasa Indonesia. But, QA is my first priority.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice
really need?

My plans are around social aspects, and marketing LibreOffice. Indonesians often know Microsoft Office as well as their neighbour’s business. But sometimes, when they cannot buy a licence, they get a cracked version. So it’s a pity that they don’t yet know about the powerful alternative, LibreOffice.

So, I think LibreOffice really needs more marketing, publications, and promotion to increase its popularity in developing countries.

Thanks to Stanislaus for his great work! Everyone is welcome to join our friendly worldwide community – you don’t need to be a developer. You can help out in marketing, design, documentation, translations and more. Build up skills, have fun, and see what you can do for LibreOffice!

Members of The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – help to steer the project, vote for the Board of Directors, and spread the word. Today we’re talking to Leif-Jöran Olsson, who has recently become a member of TDF…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I am from beautiful Sweden, more precisely from the land of deep forests and white rivers in the middle of the country.

I work as a research engineer and IT operations supervisor at the Swedish Language Bank (a language technology research institute) daytime. I also run the consultancy company Frirogramvarusyndikatet.se, which among other things provides IT admin to TDF, and is a Collabora Productivity partner.

I am soon to become a grandfather for the first time. So, exciting times ahead.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Translations are ongoing, and the review of the grammar and spell checking infrastructure is running since last year. But the largest contribution in time and effort is the current work on a LibreOffice Online-based Sailfish OS app (like the ones for Android and iOS).

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

After promoting LibreOffice for many years, we decided to do a significant push for LibreOffice Online in late 2016. And since we from that time also provided IT admin services to TDF, I have been hanging around at hackfests etc.

But since the membership obligations are more towards personal contributions, I did not feel that I contributed enough to become a member. So in addition to becoming a Collabora Productivity partner at the FOSDEM hackfest 2018, I started to think about what I could do as personal contributions.

Since I work with language technology, I prepared for a review of the grammar and spell checking infrastructure in LibreOffice. In the dark ages I actually did a Swedish dictionary extension for the release of OpenOffice 3 with the new packaging format. I also started to contribute to the Swedish translations of LibreOffice. This is something I also do for other projects like Nextcloud, OTRS, SailfishOS, Matomo etc.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need right now?

I will also try to get closer to the standardisation and evolvement of the Open Document Format specification, since I have experience from SIS the Swedish part of ISO. In addition, as an eXist-db core developer, XML is close to my heart.

We need to get closer to valuing/counting all contributions equally. I felt the translations were not counted as real contributions in the way code is (and I say this with a free software coding experience of 25+ years). This makes me a bit sad that we are not ahead of other projects in this aspect. But let us start changing this with the very positive 10/20 years celebrations with a grand Fest Noz now. Kenavo / på återseende!

Thanks to Leif for all his contributions! And to anyone else reading this who’s involved in the LibreOffice project and community, consider becoming a member: