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Report about policy related activities in the EU

The Document Foundation, thanks to the widespread popularity of LibreOffice, is recognized as one of the largest FOSS organizations worldwide, and especially in Europe (where the project was born over 20 years ago). Because of this, during the last couple of years TDF has been involved in several discussions about policies which can affect or are affecting the adoption of FOSS, or the freedom of users’ choice for hardware, operating systems and software. A freedom of choice which should be protected by laws, especially when involving public administrations (with a strong focus on schools and universities, where future citizens grow up).

In December 2022, TDF’s Board of Directors has decided to increase public policy related activities in the EU by sponsoring travels to events organized by Open Forum Europe (OFE) – an umbrella organization supporting FOSS at the EU in Brussels – and by the European Commission – including DIGIT, the department in charge of IT related policies – on this specific topic, and I have been assigned this task within the team.

So far, most of the activities have been focused on the amendment of the proposed Cyber Resilience Act or CRA (https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/cyber-resilience-act), which – in the current version – would have a negative impact on FOSS in general. The first activity has been the drafting of a document commenting the CRA on the “Have Your Say” platform provided by the EC: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/13410-Cyber-Resilience-Act_en. A summary of the most significant comments, including TDF’s comment, has been provided by OSI: https://blog.opensource.org/the-ultimate-list-of-reactions-to-the-cyber-resilience-act/.

In term of meetings, apart from regular meetings with representatives of other FOSS projects organized by OFE, just before FOSDEM I have attended OFE’s meeting in Brussels, and during FOSDEM a specific round table organized by FOSS organizations. In March, I have discussed the potentially negative impact of the CRA with representatives of DIGIT. In April, I will be at the meeting organized by the Swedish Government – temporary president of the European Commission – in Stockholm, where the Cyber Resilence Act will be a key topic. Hopefully, the joint efforts put in place during these months by FOSS foundations, communities and organizations will contribute to a better Cyber Resilience Act.

LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2023

Montage of images from this post

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

Conference logo

  • Throughout the month, we had three updates to LibreOffice – version 7.5.1 on March 2, and version 7.5.2 on March 30. We’re also maintaining the older LibreOffice 7.4 branch, and released 7.4.6 on March 9.

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

  • LibreOffice installer improvements (on Windows) are coming, thanks to Rachael Odetayo, Ximena Alcaman and Outreachy mentors. We talked to Rachael about what she’s working on, and how the installation process will be simplified.

Rachael Odetayo

  • Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology.

LibreOffice Technology stack

Women's Day banner

  • While we’re planning the LibreOffice Conference 2023, as mentioned, we’re also looking further ahead to 2024. If you’d like to host the conference in your location, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

Conference 2022 group photo

Czech guidebook cover

  • Members of the German-speaking LibreOffice community met at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage event. They had a booth with merchandise, and answered questions from visitors.

LibreOffice booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

German LibreOffice community meeting, March 2023 in Essen

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, and many members of this community live in German-speaking countries. From 24 to 26 March, some of them met at the Linuxhotel in Essen. There was an informal meeting on Friday evening, while the main discussions started on Saturday. The topics included:

  • Further development of the Base database module
  • LibreOffice community at free software events
  • Flyers and donations
  • UX improvement possibilities
  • Status of the German LibreOffice project

Delicious food

It was a nice meeting, even if some couldn’t be there, and hopefully we’ll see each other again at events like FrOSCon – and of course the LibreOffice Conference in Bucharest in September!

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice Czech User Guides are now in the Bookshelf

The Czech Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Czech LibreOffice User Guides in the LibreOffice Bookshelf.

Thanks to the efforts of Zdeněk Crhonek and Stanislav Horáček, the bookshelf has now all recent user guides in Czech, available in PDF, OpenDocument (LibreOffice’s native file format) and HTML for online reading in the browser. As a true community effort, the Czech team also fixed some annoying bugs in the website.

The LibreOffice Bookshelf aims to be an easy way to be installed in companies, organizations or school premises, since all contents are static files and can be cloned from the LibreOffice repository.

You can access the LibreOffice Bookshelf at the address https://books.libreoffice.org and the source code is available at the address https://git.libreoffice.org/infra/bookshelf/

Want more guides in other languages? Join our localisation project and let’s make them happen!

We were at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023!

LibreOffice booth

In the LibreOffice community, most of our activities take place online: development, design, QA, localisation, marketing and so forth. But we like to meet face-to-face too, at events and conferences – and last weekend we did just that, at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023 in Germany.

We had a booth with LibreOffice materials (flyers, stickers, pens and books):

Booth materials

As it was a Linux and free software-oriented event, almost all participants already knew about (and used) LibreOffice, but they had lots of interesting questions about our project.

Linux-Tage logo

Some visitors to our booth told us about deployments of LibreOffice in their businesses and organisations, while others talked to us about interesting use cases of LibreOffice in education and other areas.

Thanks to the Linux-Tage organisers for a great meetup! Now we’re looking forward to more events this year – and especially the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in September… 😊

Participants talking to each other

Call for Papers for LibreOffice Conference 2023

Meet us in Bucharest, and tell us what you’re doing with LibreOffice! The event is now live: https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2023/

The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s LibreOffice Conference in Bucharest by filling the Call for Papers form with a short description/bio of yourself as well as your talk/workshop proposal at the following address: https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2023/cfp

The event will take place from Thursday, September 21, to Saturday, September 23, 2023. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by July 15, 2023 in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.

The conference program will be based on the following community tracks:

a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
d) Appealing LibreOffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
f) Advocating, Promoting, Marketing LibreOffice

We will also have a “LibreOffice in Business” track:

  • Enterprise Deployments and Migrations
  • Certifications and Best Practices
  • Building a successful business around LibreOffice
  • Round table with company representatives
  • Small local businesses, governments and non profits

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A). Workshops, with discussion on a specific subject or hands-on sessions, will last from 60 to 120 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

If you need a VISA, please get in touch with the organization team by sending an email at conference@libreoffice.org as soon as possible, to get an invitation letter.

If you cannot travel to Romania and prefer to present remotely, please add a note to your talk proposal, in order to allow organizers to schedule your talk on Friday (and organize a test session in advance).

If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on TDF’s YouTube channel, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music or pictures, etc.).

If you want to give multiple talks, please send a separate proposal for each one.

Thanks a lot for your participation!

You can enter proposals until July 15

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