Category: Community

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

• Throughout the month, we posted sections from our Annual Report 2021, covering activities at The Document Foundation and in the LibreOffice project. First was LibreOffice in 2021, followed by TDF, our yearly conference, and documentation community activities. Stay tuned for more sections – and the full report!

• How do different free and open source software projects do mentorship, and how can we all learn from each other? Daniel Garcia Moreno (EndlessOS Foundation and GNOME), Emily Gonyer (openSUSE), Ilmari Lauhakangas (The Document Foundation), and Marie Nordin (Fedora) discuss this in a panel moderated by Ben Cotton:

• Later in April, we republished an open letter covering the “Right to Install any Software on any Device”. Find out more about it here.

• Lastly, we announced that the Latin-American LibreOffice Conference 2022 will take place in Brasília on August 25 and 26. The event will be held at the Catholic University of Brasília, in the Taquaritinga – DF.

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!

Boost your skillset and learn new things – join the Month of LibreOffice! The software is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.

So in the coming four weeks, we’d love it if you get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in the next four weeks can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

• Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.

• First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.3.2”.

• Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.

• Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

• Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

• Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

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

• We started off March with a custom shape tutorial from Regina Henschel. If you’ve ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice, check it out!

• Following the release of LibreOffice 7.3 in February, we kept track of media articles to see what the press was saying. Here’s a list of articles in Italian, Polish and Portuguese.

• During March, TDF released two new updates for LibreOffice: 7.3.1 and 7.3.2. These fix bugs and improve compatibility – so all users of the 7.3 branch are recommended to update. (We also released LibreOffice 7.2.6 on March 10.)

• Meanwhile, the Czech community worked on a translation of the LibreOffice Base Guide 6.4. Thanks to Marcela Tomešová, Martin Kasper, Zdeněk Crhonek, Jan Martinovský, Roman Toman and Miloš Šrámek for their great work! 👍

• On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day. Our Diversity and Inclusion Group aims to improve diversity in the project, and “LibreLadies” is a project we started to connect and assist women who are interested in using and contributing to LibreOffice.

• How can we make free and open source software development sustainable in the long term? Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation appeared on the Sustain OSS podcast to talk about this issue, along with the challenges and opportunities in building communities.

• And shortly after, Heiko Tietze (TDF’s UX Mentor) appeared on the sister podcast covering design-related topics! Have a listen…

• In the middle of the month, the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation started its new term. Welcome to new new members, and thank you to those who are moving on, for all their work and support.

• LibreOffice is taking part in the Google Summer of Code 2022. If you’re a contributor, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, get involved!

• Native language projects around the world help to make LibreOffice available to hundreds of millions of people. On March 19, we announced new (and bridged) communication channels for the Indian LibreOffice community. Join in and let’s help to spread the word about LibreOffice and free software in that part of the world!

• Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute many features and fixes to the software, and provide long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits. We caught up with Michael Meeks of Collabora Productivity to find out what his team has been working on in recent versions of the suite.

• In 2019, the German LibreOffice community sadly lost one of its most active members, Klaus-Jürgen Weghorn. In his memory, The Document Foundation (the non-profit foundation behind LibreOffice) has decided to support a student through the Deutschlandstipendium initiative.

• And finally, our documentation team announced the Writer Guide 7.3. This covers all aspects of the word processing component in LibreOffice, and is well worth keeping on your (digital) bookshelf…

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!