Translated by Timothy Brennan Jr.
Rio de Janeiro, September 26, 2024 – The Brazilian LibreOffice community proudly presents its new edition of the Writer Guide 7.6 , based on LibreOffice 7.6 and with the innovations introduced in this version.
The guide meets the need for LibreOffice documentation in Brazilian Portuguese and the Writer Guide will help all LibreOffice users in editing texts, monographs, theses, reports, minutes and much more.
Berlin, 25 September 2024 – The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 will take place in Luxembourg from the 10 to the 12 October 2024. It will be hosted by the Digital Learning Hub and the local campus of 42 Luxembourg at the Terres Rouges buildings in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette.
This is a key event that brings together the LibreOffice community – supporting the leading FOSS office suite – with a large number of stakeholders: large open source projects, international organizations and representatives from EU institutions and European government departments.
Organized in partnership with the Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre (LMDDC), which will host the EdTech track, the event is sponsored by allotropia and Collabora, the two companies contributing more actively to the development of LibreOffice; Passbolt, the Luxembourg made open source password manager for teams; and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg.
In addition, local partners such as Luxembourg Convention Bureau, LIST, LU-CIX and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity are supporting the organization of various aspects of the conference.
After the opening session in the morning of the 10 October, which includes institutional presentations from the Minister for Digitalisation, the Ministry of the Economy and the European Commission’s OSPO, there will be tracks about LibreOffice covering development, quality, security, documentation, localization, marketing and enterprise deployments, and tracks about open source covering technologies in education, OSS applications and cybersecurity. Another session will focus on OSPOs (Open Source Programme Officers).
The LibreOffice and Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2024 provides a platform to discuss the latest technical developments, community contributions, and the challenges facing open source software and communities of which TDF, LibreOffice and its community are important components. Professionals, developers, volunteers and users from various fields will share their experiences and collaborate on the future direction of the leading office suite.
Policy and decision makers will find counterparts from all over Europe with which they will be able to exchange ideas and experiences that will help them to promote and implement open source software in public, education and private sector organizations.
On 11 and 12 October, there will also be workshops focusing on different aspects of LibreOffice development, targeted to undergraduate Computer Science students or anyone who knows programming, and wants to become familiar with a large scale real world open source software project. To be able to better support the participants we limited the number of seats to 20 so register for the workshops as soon as possible to reserve your place.
Everyone is encouraged to register and participate in the conference to engage with the open source community, learn from different experts and contribute to meaningful discussions. Please note that, to avoid waste, we will plan for food, drinks and other free items for registered attendees so help us to cater for your needs by registering in time.
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
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.
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.
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.
Our Taiwanese community reports back from a recent event:
The LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was held in Taipei from 2 – 3 August. This conference was suspended for several years due to the pandemic and was relaunched in Indonesia last year.
In addition to the local community, there were many partners from the Japanese and Indonesian communities, as well as experts from Germany and Italy, representing The Documentation Foundation and the Open Document Format Technical Committee, who attended this conference.
The main visual design of the conference was developed by students at the Open Design Club in National Chengchi University. They boldly adopted the theme of “rice” since that’s a common staple food in Asian countries, and created a series of exquisite logos, icons and merchandise.
Staff in Government Day and the main poster
There were two main topics in this conference: Government Day and Community Day.
The first day, “Government Day”, focused on Open Document Format (ODF) policy and “Public Money, Public Code” (PMPC). Six scholars and experts along with LibreOffice community members were invited to give talks, which covered topics from policy theory to practical practices when adopting ODF and PMPC in government. The audience was mostly made up of users from central and local government units.
The first speaker was Lothar Becker, co-chairman of TDF’s Certification Committee and also a board member of Open Source Business Alliance in Germany. This talk summarized lessons learned from 25 years of migration experiences to LibreOffice Technology in governmental organizations, from famous ones like the “LiMux” project in Munich, to up-to-date migration projects for 30,000 PCs in the government of the German state Schleswig-Holstein.
The second speaker was Prof. Naiyi Hsiao, the chair of Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University. This session explored what and why the PMPC practice has encountered legal and administrative concerns among the diverse stakeholders.
The third speaker was Director Cheng Ming Wang, the general director of Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for the ODF policy in Taiwan. His talk introduced three aspects of Taiwan’s ODF promotion: why Taiwan promotes ODF; the process and current status of ODF promotionl and the next steps.
The fourth speaker was Svante Schubert, co-chairman and co-editor of the ODF Technical Committee. His talk briefly gave an introduction to ODF and provided an update. In addition, he explained how the TDF-hosted ODF Toolkit is facilitating daily ODF usage (like for automated document translation).
The fifth speaker was Italo Vignoli, Board of Directors member of The Document Foundation. His talk discussed the role of open source software and open standards in digital sovereignty. Today, user-created content – and the ability to share it transparently – is in the hands of a few companies that take advantage of users’ limited digital culture. This situation can only be overcome by moving from proprietary to open source software and from proprietary to open standards.
The last session was from Prof. Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the Associate Research Fellow/Professor of Institute of Information Science in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. In this presentation, he highlighted the important roles of data infrastructure in facilitating the development and sharing of communal digital resources, and related the practice of communal data infrastructure to the Public Money Public Code (PMPC) initiative.
Group photo of Government Day
The second day of the conference was dedicated to the LibreOffice community, and was organized as a COSCUP session track. Community members from Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, and Japan shared various topics. Italo Vignoli spoke about the history and evolution of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. Lothar Becker shared several funny and ridiculous stories from his experiences helping different organizations to adopt LibreOffice. Two LibreOffice Certified Profession Trainers from Taiwan, Kai-Ju Tsai and Teresa Hou, demonstrated advanced applications of Writer and Calc. The Indonesian community focused on visual design, sharing their experiences in creating presentation templates, vector graphics and themes for LibreOffice.
Additionally, a member of the team who organized last year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference in Indonesia discussed the challenges and joys of planning international events. The Japanese community shared their difficult experiences in advocating LibreOffice to local governments and private sectors in Japan, resonating deeply with participants from other countries!
Italo Vignoli introduced TDF to the Asian community
LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainer Kai-Ju Tsai demonstrated advanced usage of Writer
Two young Indonesian community members showed how they learned to make designs using open source tools like Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw
In addition to the two-day main topics, there were also several additional activities.
On 4 August, the Open Design Club of National Chengchi University held a “Design workshop”. In this workshop, students from ODC and Indonesian community members divided into groups, and were challenged to design a movie poster in 30 minutes. Then they shared their experiences and work of designing using open source tools.
Students from Taiwan and Indonesian community members designed a movie poster together
On 5 August, Franklin Weng, the president of Software Liberty Association Taiwan, led a group of ten international community members, including Svante Schubert, Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker, to visit the Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for promoting ODF policies.
They were received by General Director Cheng Ming Wang, Senior Analysts Chun-Wei Tsai and Tsung-Yen Wang, and Section Chief of Application Development, Chun-Chieh Chen. The meeting discussed various possibilities for participating in the ODF Technical Committee and collaborating with The Document Foundation’s certification system, as well as exchanging views on future artificial intelligence (AI) trends.
Visit to Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs
During these days, several major Asian community leaders also reached an agreement that next year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference will be held in Japan. We look forward to LibreOffice/ODF/PMPC taking root more deeply in Asia!
Today we’re talking to Gladys David, who is helping out in LibreOffice’s Quality Assurance (QA) project…
Hi! My name is gladys, I’m 41 years old and I’m French. I’ve been living in Espoo (Finland) for about six years – it’s a country where I always wanted to live. Previously I stayed in London for 10 years, and was in France before that.
I work in fashion retail management, and like to hike, read, go to the sauna and my garden. I always wanted to work in IT, but as I had no experience in computer science, I never got the courage to start. So I got involved with LibreOffice through a volunteer platform on the internet.
I learnt about bug triaging, confirmed newly reported bugs, and starting to bibisect. I’m still really new to it. Big thanks to Ilmari for spending time coaching me. I wouldn’t have been able to do it on my own! His help and advice pushed me to go forward.
It’s awesome to see how the community is working together to fix issues. And a even greater feeling to be part of it.
My advice to anyone who is not from the field of computer science and would like to contribute to open source: anything can be learned with patience and dedication. I will continue learning new skills and would like to contribute much more to LibreOffice in the future.
Big thanks to Gladys for all her contributions! Everyone is welcome to join our community, build new skills, and help to make LibreOffice even better for the whole world 😊
FrOSCon is a yearly free and open source software (FOSS) conference that takes place in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. And this year, the LibreOffice community was present! We had a stand with information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, beer/coffee mats and more:
Over the two days, many people visited our stand and asked us questions: what are we working on, when the next release is due (in a few days!), how LibreOffice compares to OpenOffice, and how to get involved.
Thanks to Hartmut Schorrig, Andreas Mantke, Uwe Altmann and Stefan Unverricht for helping out at the stand. We plan to attend other events in the coming months, so stay tuned to this blog for details – and don’t forget about the upcoming LibreOffice Conference 2024 in Luxembourg!
