Community Member Monday: Gladys David

Gladys David

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 😊

LibreOffice community at FrOSCon 2024 near Bonn!

LibreOffice community at FrOSCon 2024

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:

LibreOffice community at FrOSCon 2024

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.

LibreOffice community at FrOSCon 2024

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!

Membership Committee elections: Townhall sessions with the candidates

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit home of LibreOffice, and its Membership Committee (MC) administers membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes.

TDF would like to run “townhall” discussion sessions with the candidates for this year’s membership committee election and invite all the community. We will plan with three different sessions to accommodate for three different time zones.

The sessions will take place on our Jitsi instance.

The first session, for the BRT timezone, will be Monday, August 26, 2100 BRT (which is Tuesday, August 27, 0900 JST, 0000 UTC, 0200 CEST) – Time zone converter

The second session, for the CEST timezone, will be Tuesday, August 27, 2100 CEST, 1600 BRT, 1900 UTC (which is Wednesday, August 28, 0400 JST) – Time zone converter

The third session, for the JST timezone, will be Wednesday, August 28, 2100 JST, 0900 BRT, 1200 UTC, 1400 CEST – Time zone converter

Some notes

  • Please note that for two of the meetings, depending on the timezone they take place at different days.
  • We plan with two hours duration for each session.
  • Sessions are not mandatory to participate in the elections. They are an offer for candidates and community members.
  • Everyone is invited to all the sessions, independent of the timezone.
  • We welcome translators from the communities, so questions can be asked in different languages.
  • We will try to record the sessions. By participating to the sessions you agree that you will be recorded with audio, video and chat. If you do not want that, you can participate anonymously and listen-only.
  • Please mute yourself while you are not speaking.

We invite everyone to send in their questions for the townhall sessions in advance to the public board-discuss forum.

Each session will have a moderator who chooses some of the questions to be asked during the townhall meetings. Candidates are also free to answer questions on board-discuss before or after the sessions.

Community Member Monday: Khushi Gautam

Khushi Gautam

Tell us a bit about yourself!

Hi, I am so glad to be a part of this community. I live in Delhi, India. Currently, I am a software developer serving at Amazon MiniTV.

I have experience in both frontend and backend development for mobile and web applications. I graduated a year ago with a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Harcourt Butler Technical University.

I’ve been involved in the open source community since my first year of undergrad, starting with AnitaB, and then moving on to ODK-X. My major contributions have been to LibreOffice.

In my free time, I love writing articles, trying out different cuisines, and meeting new people. I also enjoy traveling and exploring new places with my friends and family.

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

I’m currently working on fixing bugs in my Outreachy project, “Sidebar Deck for Quick Find”, alongside Google Summer of Code students to make further progress. This feature was something I created during my internship at LibreOffice.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

LibreOffice includes applications like Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Base, and is the default suite for Linux. I started my journey with LibreOffice as an Outreachy applicant, which was my first time contributing to LibreOffice and interacting with other developers on the IRC channel. After researching various organizations and projects, I chose to contribute to the “Sidebar Deck for Quick Find” project because it aligned with my skills as a C++ developer.

LibreOffice screenshot: Sidebar Deck for Quick Find

Weekly mentoring chats with Ilmari Lauhakangas were incredibly helpful during the contribution phase. He guided me in setting up my project locally and introduced me to starter tasks, which made me more comfortable with the project and the organization. I also learned to operate Gerrit and successfully made my first patch.

Later, I was selected as an Outreachy intern to work on the “Sidebar Deck for Quick Find” project. My mentors, Jim Raykowski and Heiko Tietze, were instrumental in making the project successful. I was thrilled when my patch for the feature was merged after three months of hard work.

My experience with LibreOffice was enriching, as I got to work closely with the entire codebase, something I always wanted to do. The community is very supportive, and I’m looking forward to meeting them in person at the upcoming conference.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

These days, I’m aiming to join a multinational corporation as a backend developer and hope to achieve this goal soon. I also aspire to join LibreOffice as a developer. Even though I’m already contributing, I love that open source allows me to continue working freely. Additionally, I plan to create a wiki for the feature I’ve developed and take ownership of presenting it to the world upon its launch.

What does LibreOffice really need?

I would say: more developers and contributors like me!

Big thanks to Khushi 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 😊

LibreOffice project and community recap: July 2024

LibreOffice project and community recap banner

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • On the 11th, we announced LibreOffice 24.2.5, the fifth minor update to the latest major release. This includes 70 bug and compatibility fixes, and all users are recommended to update. (The previous branch, LibreOffice 7.6, is no longer maintained.)

LibreOffice 24.2 banner

Annual Report 2023 banner

LibreOffice P2P collaboration mockup

  • And finally, the QA team announced LibreOffice 24.8 RC1 – the first Release Candidate for what will become the final version in late August. Please help us to test it!

LibreOffice 24.8 RC1 banner

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