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

Czech translation of LibreOffice Base Guide – and more news

Base Guide cover

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech team translated the LibreOffice Base Guide 7.3 – and it’s now available on the documentation page. Our team consists of three translators: Petr Kuběj, Radomír Strnad and Zdeněk Crhonek, along with localized screenshot maker Roman Toman, and Miloš Šrámek, who prepared machine translations.

A second bit of news related to guides and documentation is that Stanislav Horáček created a Czech Bookshelf page. The Bookshelf is a project of LibreOffice’s Documentation team, where the guides are converted to HTML web pages. Stanislav created an automated script, and made the first conversion of the “Getting Started Guide” Czech translation. After polishing the script, he plans to convert all Czech guides.

Many thanks to everyone in the Czech community for their work! Learn more about LibreOffice’s documentation project here.

Happy International Women’s Day

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge women’s equality. Collectively we can all #EmbraceEquity.

Celebrate women’s achievement. Raise awareness about discrimination. Take action to drive gender parity. #IWD2023 belongs to everyone, everywhere. Inclusion means all #IWD2023 action is valid.