Category: Community

We’re proud to announce, that from now on, LibreOffice is also an SPI-associated project. This also helps users from the US to donate via credit card and local bank accounts (don’t forget to mention “LibreOffice” when donating).

By Vedran Miletić

LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka (Croatia)

Event was originally planned for January when we expected release of LibO 3.3. Since LibO was released on 25.1, we decided to postpone because of the last tests and then the final exams around that time. The next plan was to March (during February most students from other towns are home). On 14.3. we held LibreOffice 3.3 release party in Rijeka. University of Rijeka Department of Informatics provided us with the room. Irena Hartmann, first year student of informatics, decorated the room with green and white paper chains.

The event itself went great. We started with a lecture given by Domagoj Margan, second year student of informatics. The lecture was focused on the history of StarOffice->Sun StarOffice->OpenOffice.org->BrOffice.org->LibreOffice, LibreOffice in general and new features in 3.3, and a bit of the story about Oracle’s relationship with opensource community in general. There were approximately 30 people, mostly first and second year students of informatics. At the event we had drinks and cakes (in LibreOffice palette; we especially mention LibreOffice cake) and airplanes made of paper with the logo of LibO. People had a great time talking and having fun.

In the future, we hope that the release date of LibO 3.5 will be known in advance, so that we can prepare something like this a few days after the release of new version. We will probably extend it with some kind of workshop focused on features which might be of interest to users of Office tools and send invitations to all Rijeka companies that might be interested to come.

The next marketing confcall will take place on Tuesday, March 29th, at 16:00 UTC (=18:00 German time). Remember that in some countries, daylight saving time will be in effect by that date! To determine your local date and time, see the converter in the Doodle poll at http://www.doodle.com/nn9gubpev28kzeus

Dial-in details will be provided in time. Please add your desired agenda items and topics you want to discuss about to http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/ConfCalls#Agenda

Looking forward to hearing you, and to be working with you on marketing LibreOffice and its community!

For quite a while, I have been asked about the number of subscriptions in our mailing lists. I’ve now spent some time in the night and hacked a little bash script, to compile recent numbers, and will regularly post these to our moderators mailing list. Today’s statistics, for example, are available in this posting.

For the future, I plan to enhance the script to show some more statistics, like the number of total postings, the number different countries, the number of moderators, and some graphical representation of the data. Stay tuned!

The Document Foundation welcomes the contribution of Canonical‘s development team to LibreOffice. In particular it is great to welcome Bjoern Michaelsen’s recent addition to the full time team on the project from Canonical. Bjoern brings deep expertise on the LibreOffice core, and has spearheaded many improvements in his previous role at Oracle, we are excited to see his positive impact on LibreOffice, as well as in the Debian and Ubuntu versions of the future. It is also wonderful to see Canonical’s fixes for ARM based platforms, and the results of their investment via CodeThink in Unity Integration. It’s great to have you guys on board.

Dear Community,

the last days, we have seen long discussions, people asking about processes and directions, and the role of the Steering Committee was unclear to some Community members. I do not want to discuss the issues in detail, I even don’t want to mention them by name, but I felt it was time to bring some personal thoughts into them. The following paragraphs are just my personal thoughts and not an official statement of the Steering Committee, but I hope they help all of us to work on our common mission. (more…)