Berlin, October 17, 2014 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the LibreOffice Conference 2015 will be jointly organized by the Danish LibreOffice community in collaboration with local F/OSS groups and the Aarhus municipality, and hosted at the brand new Urban Media Space, from September 23 to September 25, 2015.
In addition, on September 22 the LibreOffice community will gather for several face-to-face meetings: Board of Directors, Advisory Board, Engineering Steering Committee, and Certification Committee.
Aarhus is a city of education, knowledge and research. Its university is internationally recognized for its contributions within, among other fields, social sciences, technology and science. Aarhus is known to attract talented students from around the world which also provides the city with a great diversity.
“Hosting the LibreOffice Conference will be an exciting opportunity for the entire Danish free software community”, says Leif Lodahl, a long time leader of the Danish LibreOffice community, a founder of The Document Foundation, and the architect of several large migration projects to LibreOffice. “We are looking forward to welcoming LibreOffice volunteers and advocates from every corner of the world”.
Support The Document Foundation
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to strengthen the foundation, support development related activities such as QA and localization, expand the infrastructure, and accelerate marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
100,000 donations in 500 days, from May 1st, 2013, to October 13, 2014, with an average of 200 donations per day.
Three square numbers which have a greater meaning than their actual one, for the entire free software ecosystem.
Together with volunteers, contributing their time, and Advisory Board members, investing in The Document Foundation, individual donors are making the dream of an independent self-sustaining free software foundation – capable of pushing the best free office suite to the next level of awesomeness – a solid, enduring reality.
Back in 2010, when the independent foundation was announced, one of the most frequent objections was based on the false assumption that a large free software project cannot exist without a single large corporate sponsor.
After four years, we can not only affirm that the dream has come true, but that the dream has a bright future.
Thanks to donations, we have been able to fund hackfests (like the upcoming one in Toulouse, France, on November 15/16), QA volunteer netbooks for bug triage, tinderboxes for developers, improvements of ask.libreoffice.org for non-english users, LibreOffice booths at exhibitions, native language community events, a stronger independent infrastructure, and so on.
What is more important, we have been able to demonstrate that a large free software project does not need a single large corporate sponsor to thrive, but can rely on a diverse ecosystem based on companies but also on volunteers, supported by individual donors.
Companies come and go, while volunteers – and hopefully individual donors – stay.
So far, they have had the unique power of making a ten year long dream come true, and become history. With a simple donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org, they can keep the history alive, forever.
Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of the Board at The Document Foundation, has announced the elections for the Membership Committee.
Dear Community,
all members of The Document Foundation are called to vote on a new Membership Committee. Therefore, the Board of Directors hereby announces the elections to the Membership Committee with the following timeline:
2014-07-19: announcement of the elections (this e-mail); and start of the nomination phase
2014-08-27, 24:00 CET/UTC+2: end of the nomination phase
2014-09-04, 00:00 CET/UTC+2: official start of the elections
2014-09-11, 24:00 CET/UTC+2: end of the elections
2014-09-12: announcement of the preliminary results; and start of the challenging phase
2014-09-17, 24:00 CET/UTC+2: end of the challenging phase
2014-09-18: official announcement of the final results
2014-09-19: new Membership Committee officially in charge
To announce your candidacy, send a message to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and a description of your reasons for
wanting to serve as a committee member. All candidates should also send a summary of their candicacy announcement to elections@documentfoundation.org – a compilation of the summaries will be mailed to all registered voters prior to the elections. Summaries should be no more than 75 words of continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs) and must be received by the nomination deadline given above.
Available slots will be filled by a single transferable vote system, seats filled in decreasing order of preference. This election is according to our statutes, and the term of office is two years.
All discussion related to the elections should be held on board-discuss@documentfoundation.org where members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates. Instructions explaining how to vote will be sent via e-mail to all eligible voters in time before the election.
The board will announce preliminary results as soon as possible after the elections close, along with instructions on how to access the votes archive and how to independently verify the vote count.
Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org within the aforementioned deadline. Once any challenges have been resolved, the board shall announce the final results.
The location of the 2015 LibreOffice Conference will be announced at the end of July, so that the winning team may attend the 2014 LibreOffice Conference in Bern, Switzerland (September 2nd to September 5th).
“The LibreOffice Conference is a large event, which spans over four days and is a unique gathering opportunity for our growing community. Starting from 2014, we intend to present next year location at the previous conference”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “This also offers a chance to involve next year’s team during the last phase of the organization, in order to ensure that they are acquainted with the process”.
For additional information: conference@libreoffice.org.
2013 has been one of the best years for LibreOffice in Brazil
and it is becoming even better.
The Brazilian community outperformed itself in all kind of activities around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation during 2013. We attended ten events, signed an important agreement and got our first LibreOffice certified developer. It was also time to start looking at our neighbors in Latin America.
Events
We participated in ten events sponsoring activities in LibreOffice. The FLISOL 2013 in Brasilia to invite new developers to join our development. The FSLDC 2013 in Duque de Caxias, promoting LibreOffice to a broad audience of users and developers. The Document Freedom Day 2013 was also coordinated by the Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and sponsored by SINDPD-RJ.
FSLDC Duque de CaxiasFLISOL – Brasília: Call for new developers. From left to right: Deivi Kuhn, Henderson Matsuura, Olivier HallotThe Document Freedom Day in Rio de Janeiro. From left to right: Eliane Domingos, Marcelo Soriano and Marcio Monteiro
The Lecture Cycle of SINDPD-RJ regularly talked on LibreOffice new developments on each major release in 2013, accessing a focused set of IT professionals and FOSS advocates. The Santa Catarina State LibreOffice community also had its 2nd LibreOffice Meeting that included a hack day for students interested in starting to contribute code to LibreOffice and the SOLISC (in the same state) also had lectures on LibreOffice, lead by Klaibson Ribeiro.
Then we had our major event, FISL 14 in July 2013, where we brought Italo Vignoli, Bjoern Michaelsen and Olivier Hallot of The Document Foundation Board of Directors to lecture on LibreOffice migrations, LibreOffice community engagements and LibreOffice development. At the same event the State of Rio Grande do Sul and The Docuemnt Foundation agreed to partner for the deployment of Open Document Formats and LibreOffice within the State public administration, aiming a few hundred thousands desktops.
FISL 2013: The State of Rio Grande do Sul adopts ODF and LibreOffice as document edition format and tool of choice.FISL 2013: Community gathering at the largest opensource event in Brazil: From left to right: Olivier Hallot, Bjoern Michaelsen, Italo Vignoli (TDF), Dr. Richard Stallman (FSF), Eliane Domingos, Gustavo Pacheco, David Jourdain (LibreOffice community)
Next in August we had the CONSEGI, in Brasilia, where the federal public administration get together to deal with a broad set of issues related to FOSS, and where our Chairman Florian Effenberger was invited as keynote speaker, together with most of the Brazilian community to run lectures, workshops and round-tables on FOSS and LibreOffice. The Document Foundation represented by Florian and Ms Eliane Domingos received the “Demoiselle” Award in recognition of the contribtion for the communities of open source software.
CONSEGI 2013: The “Demoiselle” award for achievements in the OpenSource community to The Document Foundation (Florian Effenberger) and Eliane Domingos (LibreOffice Brazilian community)
In October, we ran the LibreOffice show and partied for its 3rd birthday in Latinoware, an event that happens in Foz do Iguaçu, in the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, sponsored by Itaipu Binacional, the company that operates the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam. This event is a gathering of several nationals interested in promoting FOSS among their citizens and a project to translate LibreOffice to guarani, the native language of Paraguay, emerged.
Celebrating LibreOffice Anniversary in LatinoWare 2013: from left to right: Julio Neves, Eliane Domingos, Vitorio Furusho, Klaibson Ribeiro and João Fernando
Finally we attended CISL-2013, the Argentinian congress for open source in Buenos Aires to deliver 3 lectures on LibreOffice achievements, on migrations, development and community gathering, in an effort to stimulate the Argentinian community to get more active.
CISL 2013 in Buenos Aires: Olivier Hallot (TDF) sharing experience in migrations for large organizations.
Development
All events of 2013 also aimed to harvest new developers for LibreOffice. From initial compilation to the first patches, the developer community grew in quantity and quality. We were able do send two Brazilian developers to Freiburg, Germany to participate in the Freiburg Hackfest. We were happy that Marcos Souza got his LibreOffice Developer Certification.
The high profile developer team in Freiburg Hackfest: Michael Stahl, Marcos Souza, José Guilherme Vanz, Stephan Bergman and Eike Rathke
Community
The community also has it say in 2013. The documentation team leaded by Raul Pacheco and Vera Cavalcante finished the translation of the Writer and Calc User Manual. This is a huge effort that the Brazilian collaborators undertake to bring knowledge to end-users, not only in Brazilian Portuguese but also for the broader Portuguese-speaking community.
The LibreOffice Magazine, an e-magazine in PDF writen and edited by the Brazilian community leaded by Eliane Domingos e Vera Cavalcante, released 6 editions on time with more than 70 A5 pages each full of information on open source software in general, LibreOffice tutorials and case studies for migration and deployments. This magazine is actually edited on a collaboration basis and is not funded by advertisements or any other means. We recorded an average of 20.000 downloads of the magazine on each edition and we have 449 followers of the magazine twitter account.
Celebrating the 3rd anniversary of LibreOffice and the 1st of LibreOffice Magazine
Responding to the trend towards social networks, the community also gathered around LibreOffice in FaceBook, Twitter and Google+. In these profiles, we have 1900 followers in the LibreOffice facebook page as well as 1400 more in the LibreOffice Facebook group. On Twitter, we have 1800 followers and 1328 in Google+.
Last, but not least, the year ended with the Document Foundation Board of Director elections where our colleague Eliane Domingos was elected. That will make 2014 even better to follow!
I hereby announce the final results of The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors elections 2013. With the challenging phase having ended without any objection to the preliminary results, the following results are now the final ones.
Elected as member are the candidates, in this order: Thorsten Behrens, Eliane Domingos de Sousa, Michael Meeks, Fridrich Strba, Adam Fyne, Joel Madero and Bjoern Michaelsen. And as deputies: Andreas Mantke, Eike Rathke and Norbert Thiebaud.
I want to say thanks to all those who ran for elections, also the members that were not elected for the board this time, and congratulations to those that were elected. By separate mail each one elected, will be invited to accept the new role as Member (or Deputy) of the Board of Directors.
As outlined in the initial announcement, the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge from February 18, 2014 on. To help the transition, the current Board of Directors will include them in the decision making process.
On behalf of the Membership Committee,
Cor Nouws, Chairman
Berlin, October 17, 2014 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the LibreOffice Conference 2015 will be jointly organized by the Danish LibreOffice community in collaboration with local F/OSS groups and the Aarhus municipality, and hosted at the brand new Urban Media Space, from September 23 to September 25, 2015.
