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Community Member Monday: Manuel Frassinetti

Today we’re chatting with Manuel Frassinetti from our Italian LibreOffice community, who recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Modena, Italy and I’m still living in this city. I’m just a normal free software user – a GNU/Linux user since 2001. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu, and then returned to Debian. The first love is never forgotten! 🙂

I use free and open source software and both in private and in my work. I have a Dell series 3500 laptop, an old IBM T42 ThinkPad in private and a HP Compaq 6000 pro at work, all with Debian 10. I am very much a beginner programmer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and also a beginner hardware technician. For both software and hardware specializations, I have not been in the world of work since 2003, since I became a tobacconist.

I don’t like obscure software updates that last an eternity without knowing what is being updated.

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

Now I’m working on wiki pages: I translate from English to Italian.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I’m part of the Italian LibreOffice guides localization team, in particular for Base, and the wiki pages localization team from 2018. I become a TDF member in 2021 thanks to Italo Vignoli and Marina Latini. I think it’s important to make a regular contribution to the TDF project: a little every day, it’ll become a mountain one day.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In future, to live happy with my wife and to be healthy. About LibreOffice: I hope for better support in the database module. Right now I use Calc to do what I’d like to do with Base.

Many thanks to Manuel for his support and contributions. Everyone is welcome to discover what they can do for LibreOffice, build up skills and have fun!

100 Paper Cuts as a new student mentoring activity

Just before the pandemic, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation approved a budget to launch an educational program targeted to universities, where students at selected tech schools would receive an economic incentive to promote LibreOffice amongst their peers, with the objective of increasing the number of young contributors both in source code development and in other areas. Unfortunately, the pandemics has forced all universities to stop all collateral activities, and this has resulted in the program being frozen for over one year.

Although the situation is not yet back to normal, we have the opportunity to mentor a student in Turkey. Muhammet Kara, a member of the MC and a Collabora full time developer, will mentor Ahmet Hakan Çelik, an undergraduate computer science student at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who will be working on 100 Paper Cuts – a list of bugs and enhancement requests relating to LibreOffice’s user experience – during June and July, trying to solve as many issues as he can. The target is to collect 10 points.

This is a first step in the direction set before the pandemic. We are planning to make similar announcements soon.

After the summer, if the academic activities will be back to normal – although the recover will be slow, and will have to cope with entirely new regulations – The Document Foundation will be able to get back in touch with the universities to start the planned Ambassador Program.

Announcing the winners in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2021!

At the beginning of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…

Fantastic! This makes it the most successful Month of LibreOffice ever, slightly overtaking the results from May 2020.

Great work, everyone! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. We’re hugely thankful for your contributions – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the wiki page can get a sticker pack, with these stickers and more:

How to claim

If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with your name (or username) from the wiki page so that we can check, along with your postal address, and we’ll send you a bunch of stickers for your PC, laptop and other kit.

(Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in May but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you!

There is one more thing…

And we have an extra bonus: 10 contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

  • Michael Warner
  • Jorge Gustavo Rocha
  • Roland Kurmann
  • Astur
  • Alessandro Volturno
  • Harshita Nag
  • Érico Nogueira
  • Chris Shaw
  • Wanderer
  • María del Mar

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks once again to everyone who took part! Your contributions keep the LibreOffice project strong. We plan to have another Month of LibreOffice in November, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!

LibreOffice monthly recap: May 2021 – Community activities

Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…

  • Right on the first day of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, showing our thanks to everyone involved in the LibreOffice project and community. Everyone who contributes during the month can get a sticker pack – and a chance to win extra merch. We’ll announce the full winners here in the next few days!

  • Did you know that you can work with 3D objects in LibreOffice? Long-time community member Regina Henschel wrote a tutorial showing how to make a 3D globe, using a map and a sphere. Rather neat…

  • In May, TDF announced two bugfix updates for LibreOffice: 7.0.6 and 7.1.3. This marks the last release of the 7.0 branch – from here on, we will be maintaining the LibreOffice 7.1 series.

  • Meanwhile, the PowerPoint compatibility team reported on its recent work, showing how PPTX presentations are imported more accurately into recent versions of LibreOffice. Of course, when you’re working on a presentation in LibreOffice, its best to use its native format – OpenDocument.

  • LibreOffice is free and open source software, available for anyone to use, modify and share – and that will always be the case. At the same time, we really appreciate the contributions of companies in the wider LibreOffice ecosystem, who sell long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits, and add many features to the codebase. So spread awareness of them, we’ve set up some LinkedIn pages for the “LibreOffice Enterprise” brands.

  • The Google Summer of Code begins! This is a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects.We announced the list of selected projects – and we’re really looking forward to seeing the results. Good luck to all the students, and thanks to the mentors for helping them!

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 for everyone!

Albanian Community Meeting – May 2021

While many pandemic restrictions around the world are still in place, some smaller events are finally becoming possible. Sidorela Uku from the Albanian LibreOffice community reports from a recent event in Tirana, which hosted the LibreOffice Conference 2018:

There were eight people present at this meeting. We had a short presentation about LibreOffice – what it includes, and its features. Also, we introduced the various ways how someone can become part of the community. We are planing to have more events in the future, as there are a few people interested in localization, but as well for people who want to switch and use LibreOffice. Also, we translated a few strings on the whatcanIdoforlibreoffice.org website, and pushed the changes to Gerrit.

Thanks to the community in Tirana for their work and support! It’s great to see some in-person events becoming possible again. LibreOffice users around the world are welcome to join our project, and help to build up local communities. If there’s no LibreOffice community in your area, drop us a line and we’ll help you to establish one!

Contest for LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology logo

The Strategic Marketing Plan discussed in 2020 has introduced a couple of concepts – LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology – which will be the cornerstone of LibreOffice marketing activities for the foreseeable future, and will be deployed on web properties, marketing materials, documents, presentations and merchandise for events. Now, we need high-impact visuals to stress the importance of these concepts for LibreOffice.

Based on the success of the community contest for the 2020 Anniversary Logo, which has provided a consistent visual image for presentations at virtual events in 2020 (and will be used in 2021 as well), The Document Foundation is challenging community members with the task of developing two different logos:

(1) LibreOffice Ecosystem logo, to underline the unique characteristics of the LibreOffice project: global reach, continuous research for improvement and high quality, inclusiveness, loyalty to copyleft licenses, smooth combination of paid and volunteer contributors, and eventually lots of fun especially at events. The LibreOffice Sustainability slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4qLzRad8wNd8pFk.

(2) LibreOffice Technology logo, to underline the uniqueness of the LibreOffice platform, which provides a single common engine for all platforms, from desktop to mobile to cloud, and therefore a more consistent way of handling files both in ODF and OOXML document formats, which improves interoperability. The LibreOffice Technology slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/Xw4A7mY6W6yJTqo.

LibreOffice Ecosystem logo is the most important one, so community members should focus their best energies on it. LibreOffice Technology logo would be nice to have, but not as important as the Ecosystem one, as this will be a logo that all community members should use.

As a reference, TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) are published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

Both logos will be used for presentations, event signage, merchandise and gadgets (like stickers). They should be easy to recognize and read even at small sizes.

Both logos logo must be developed with free and open source software, and released in vector-based (SVG) as well as bitmap-based (PNG, JPG) formats. The logo must be available in a square or nearly square version, plus other formats as appropriate. An example of a possible implementation should also be provided with the proposal.

Intellectual property must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), while a copyright transfer to TDF is not required. The authors must declare in writing that they are the sole owner of all rights related to the artwork they have developed.

It should be clear that this is not a request for a mascot, and any kind of proposal which could be interpreted as a mascot will not be considered. Also, the logo must have a global reach, and as such any reference to a regional styling approach will not be considered.

Logo proposals must be sent to: italo@libreoffice.org by Augus 31, 2021, at 11:59PM UTC. TDF Team will select the winning proposals, which will be announced – and used – during the LibreOffice Virtual Conference, from September 23 to September 25, 2021.

We look forward to meeting the authors of the winning proposals at FOSDEM 2022 in Brussels or at the LibreOffice Conference 2022 (location still to be decided), to celebrate their work.

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