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The Document Foundation welcomes a new member of the Advisory Board: King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia

KACSTBerlin, June 25, 2013 – The Document Foundation announces that King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) of Saudi Arabia is now an effective member of its Advisory Board. KACST sponsors the National Program for Free and Open Source Software Technologies (Motah: http://www.motah.org.sa/), which has been contributing to LibreOffice for almost one year, to enhance the Arabic language and the RTL (right-to-left) support, and to develop new features.

Motah LibreOffice Project (http://motah.org.sa/en/?q=node/94) is only one of the activities of Motah at KACST, where several software products are studied to explore the extent of Arabic support and their suitability for Arab users. LibreOffice was selected to be the first localization project because most Arab users need a full feature office suite.

liberoffice_image.png“Motah software engineers have been regularly contributing to LibreOffice since 2012, and are now one of the largest groups of full time developers hacking LibreOffice code, together with SUSE and Red Hat”, states Michael Meeks of SUSE, a Member of TDF Board of Directors. “Thanks to the injection of these new groups of hackers, during the last months we have been able to increase the number of contributors, which is now around 100 on a monthly basis and over 330 on a yearly basis”.

“It is fascinating to see The Document Foundation combining people from different cultures, languages and geographical locations around the development of LibreOffice, the best free office suite ever”, says Dr.Turki Alsaud, KACST VP for research institutes. “Having KACST inside TDF Advisory Board reflects our support to the development of LibreOffice, extending our reach from the improvement of the Arabic language version to the development of new features and the improvement of the user interface”.

With the addition of KACST, the Advisory Board of The Document Foundation has now ten members: FSF, Google, Intel, KACST, MIMO, Red Hat, SPI, Lanedo, Freies Office Deutschland e.V. and SUSE (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Advisory_Board).

About KACST

King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime Minister’s Office. KACST is both the Saudi Arabian national science agency and its national laboratories. The science agency function involves science and technology policy making, building national scientific database, funding of external research, and conducting applied scientific research in varius disciplines through its own research institutes and providing services such as the patent office, scientific information, and scientific consultations to public and private sector etc. KACST has currently over 2500 employees.

Media Contact KACST

Mohamed Alkanhal – Director of Computer Research Institute
Phone: + 966 11 4813765 – Email: cri@kacst.edu.sa (website: http://www.kacst.edu.sa)

LibreOffice community gets free e-mail, Jabber and SIP addresses @libreoffice.org

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind LibreOffice, the leading free office suite, today announces the upcoming availability of @libreoffice.org addresses for its members, starting July 1st. To foster the rapidly growing community and help it with their daily engagement, the foundation will provide a variety of free services under this domain. As of today, these are:

  • an e-mail address with a fully-featured IMAP account, alternatively an e-mail forwarder
  • a Jabber/XMPP address for instant messaging
  • a SIP/VoIP account for voice conferencing

Those services will be, beginning July 1st, provided free of charge to all members of The Document Foundation, and are made possible with the generous help of our supporters, whom we’d like to thank on behalf of the community!

The SIP accounts are provided by iptel.org, the free VoIP service since 2002. The Jabber/XMPP accounts, that feature a shared roster for members to see immediately who else is online, are courtesy of ProcessOne, experts in personalized instant messaging, using Hosted.IM platform. The professional e-mail accounts, supporting server-side filtering, shared folders and webmail access, are hosted by the mail server experts of Heinlein Support.

By using this new and free service, the community not only has access to up-to-date communication tools that easen their daily lives, but also can proudly show their support and appreciation for LibreOffice.

Membership at TDF is free and open to everyone who contributes to the community. Join us today at http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/application-for-tdf-community-membership/

All details on applying for the new free service will be made public on July 1st, 2013, and sent out to all eligible members.

LibreOffice QA Team launch a Bug Triage Contest

The competition will run from June 20th to July 5th, 2013
Berlin, The Document Foundation announce a Bug Triage Contest to prepare for the announcement of LibreOffice 4.1. The event will last two weeks during the availability of the first release candidate of the office suite, from June 20th to July 5th, 2013.
Details of the Bug Triage Contest are available online at the following address on TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest (the page is still a work in progress, and will be consolidated before the event).
The top 5 triagers – amongst the known ones – and the first 10 new contributors will win a TDF/LibreOffice T-shirt.

Regione Umbria awarded for the migration to LibreOffice

LibreUmbria, the migration project of Regione Umbria to LibreOffice, has been awarded a prize for innovation – for metholodology and process – as one of top 10 Italian government projects in 2012/2013.

The migration project has been launched in September 2012, and is documented on the project’s website at www.libreumbria.it (only in Italian). So far, the first 1,000 users – on a total of 6,000 for the first stage – have been migrated to LibreOffice at Provincia di Perugia, without any significant problem.

Award to LibreUmbria
The group of LibreUmbria project managers with the medal and the award

LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup on May, 11 2013

After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany last month, we are very happy to announce the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Simon Phipps and Bjoern Michaelsen will be there and have some hopefully interesting topics prepared:

  • “Foundations and Empires” (Simon)
  • “LibreOffice, the Document Foundation, the universe and all the rest” (Bjoern)

We will also have time for some good Q&A, and most importantly: some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project.

We are excited this was made possible in collaboration with the friendly local folks helping us out here (notably and among others: Mike Higashi, Geo Mealer and Alison Chaiken) and hope to meet and greet many of you there.

You are invited, please consider dropping us a note here!

Impress Sprint Dresden Retrospective

The weekend before Easter, a number of hackers congregated in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany for the first Impress Sprint. Hosted by Dresden Technical University’s Institute for Applied Photophysics, and run by TDF volunteers, the event was rooted in the desire to improve Impress for power users, and getting a number of those tiny, but annoying little paper cuts and needless extra hoops to jump through eliminated.

TDF Hackfests and Sprints are taking place all over the world, organised and run by local volunteers, are excellent opportunities to taste the spirit of the LibreOffice community, and get you bootstrapped in a weekend to fix your first bug or two. As such, we are firm believers in the help-to-help-yourself paradigm. And it is fun, too!

Image

The rather long list of tackled bugs is here – thanks to all participants for making this a success!

If you want to join us the next time, following are the upcoming opportunities:

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