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Community Member Monday: Marcin Popko

Today we’re talking to Marcin Popko, who is helping to grow the LibreOffice community in Poland…

Hey Marcin! Tell us a bit about yourself…

Hello! I’m from Bialystok, a city in north-east Poland. I work as an electromagnetic compatibility tester – it’s a seriously crazy and interesting area of electronics development. I’m quite an artist soul; in my free time I dance bachata and sing in a folk band called “Kurpie Zielone”. I also write a blog about dance, emotions and technology here.

What is the free software/Linux/LibreOffice scene like in Poland?

FLOSS (free/libre and open source software) has rather more awareness in geeky and technological domains, than in everyday normal life. LibreOffice is not well know among my friends – some of them are using Microsoft Office, and some of them are even using OpenOffice. So that’s my mission here: inform them 🙂 Companies use LibreOffice when they can’t afford Microsoft Office or when it’s not seriously needed.

You’ve recently been running Polish LibreOffice social media. How did that get started, and how has it developed?

If found a blog post about abandoned native language projects and social media sites, wrote an e-mail to the mailing list, and there I started working with Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation.

We couldn’t reach the the existing administrator of the old Polish LibreOffice fanpage, so we decided to create a new one. Then I also added a Twitter account. Step-by-step, I did surveys about our community, and I wrote articles on Polish technology sites about the current LibreOffice situation, like this one.

Then we reached 150 fans on Facebook, and I ran a sticker giveaway – thanks to Mike and TDF I can pass these stickers on to the community. We’ve also prepared a new official Polish LibreOffice site (the old one has corrupted download links).

Any tips for other people who want to start LibreOffice/FOSS social media in other countries/languages?

If you don’t know something, don’t be afraid to ask anyone from the LibreOffice community. People are helpful there and they redirect you to appropriate place if you get lost.

Many thanks to Marcin for his superb work and help! And for everyone reading this who wants to start (or expand) social media in more languages, get in touch and we’ll assist you along the way. You can gain valuable experience running social media, and of course it helps to spread the word about LibreOffice too!

Get cool merchandise for upcoming openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference

The joint openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 will take place from October 15 – 17. And there’s lots going on! We’ll have talks, presentations, keynotes, tutorials and much more – see the full schedule for all the details.

And there’s more: we’ve got merchandise too! Get prepared for the conference with a T-shirt, hoodie, bag or baseball cap, and help to support The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice.

We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

Community Member Monday: Adolfo Jayme Barrientos

Today we’re talking to Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, who has been active in the LibreOffice community for many years. He helps out with translations, design and documentation…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live and work in Mexico. I grew up in a home where we didn’t have video games or a computer, but it was filled with books; I developed a liking for reading, typography, typesetting and book design.

I was mesmerised when I got my first computer: reading also gave me an edge for learning languages, and when it came to choosing a university major, I went straight to linguistics. I work as an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher with 12 to 15-year-old pupils.

I started translating software eleven years ago, and started doing it professionally some five years ago, to finance my university tuition. I am now trilingual, and continue reading books in various Romance languages whenever I have free time.

What are you working on in LibreOffice?

As well as providing Spanish translations for the different products developed under The Document Foundation, I collaborate with the design and documentation teams.

How did you originally join the community – what was it like?

When the news broke that Oracle was buying Sun, I became concerned. I had been using Linux for a year; I feared that the main productivity suite available for Linux, OpenOffice.org, would gradually die as a result of bad leadership. Fortunately, the project’s community took the reins of it and avoided a negative fate for people like me who worry about having to store our life’s work in proprietary formats that may be deprecated in the future.

What else do you plan to work on? What does LibreOffice really need?

It’s great that TDF’s leadership has produced such a healthy ecosystem of companies who contribute developers to LibreOffice, without monopolizing power. Its community is very equitative as a result. However, investments are needed in the front-end. We can’t rely so much on volunteers to develop that kind of user interface enhancements that signal progress to end users. Papercuts like SVG icon rendering and touchscreen scrolling are long-needed, but haven’t yet found their funding.

As for my plans, I’d like to spend time learning about the best ways to market our products and attract contributors from my area.

A huge thanks to Adolfo for all his contributions and support over the years! And to all users reading this: find out what you can do for LibreOffice, to build your skillset, meet new people, and have fun in our worldwide community!

International Translation Day

International Translation Day is an international day celebrated every year on September 30 on the feast of Saint Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered the patron saint of translators. The celebrations have been promoted by International Federation of Translators (FIT) ever since it was set up in 1953. In 1991 FIT launched the idea of an officially recognized International Translation Day to show solidarity of the worldwide translation community in an effort to promote the translation profession in different countries. This is an opportunity to display pride in a profession that is becoming increasingly essential in the era of progressing globalization. In line with the celebration of 2019 as International Year of Indigenous Languages, the theme for 2020 is “Finding the words for a world in crisis”.

We celebrate our community of translators, which is providing LibreOffice in 119 different languages (with other 26 hopefully becoming available in the future), more than any other software, fulfilling one of the most important objectives of The Document Foundation: “to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their native language”. Today, there are over 4 billion people in the world who can use LibreOffice in their native language, and this is an achievement which deserves a recognition.

 

Get involved – Meet the TDF team

Joining a free and open source software project, such as LibreOffice, is a great way to build your skills, gain experience for future career options, meet new people – and have fun!

But sometimes, joining a large and well-established project can be a bit daunting at the start. So here we’ll introduce you to the small team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. Most team members oversee certain sub-projects in the LibreOffice community – click on their names to learn more in interviews…

Note that this is just the team at The Document Foundation; the LibreOffice community is made up of hundreds of people! Most of the new features are implemented by developers in our ecosystem and volunteers.

Now that you know who we are, click here to get involved and join our projects!

Documentation Team Status

By Dave Barton

In recent times, the very small LibreOffice Documentation Team has been making real progress in revising and updating the user guides:

Release 6.4

Release 7.0
Calc Guide Published Work in progress
Base Guide Published Work in progress
Draw Guide Published Work in progress
Impress Guide Skipped Work in progress
Math Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors
Writer Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors
Getting Started Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors

While this progress in shortened documentation development time is fairly good, it can be substantially improved by having more contributors on the team.

It would be terrific if all contributors were a skilled technical writers, but in reality anyone with a reasonable command of the English language and an eye for detail can make a valuable contribution. No contributor is expected to rewrite entire guide books, although some of our most experienced, long term contributors do exactly that. In fact nothing is expected or demanded of any contributor, other than to let other members of the team know what they what they have chosen to work on.

In some cases, that might be to update a chapter of an existing guide, or reviewing the work of another team member. Reviewing can take the form of proof reading, or researching the accuracy of the guide information in relation to the software’s actual operation. By identifying yourself as a Docs Team contributor does not mean you are making any permanent or long term commitment – many contributors come and go over long periods according to the demands of their “real” life.

It can be seen in the documentation status above there are at least three guides where the input of new contributors would be very welcome. If you are interested in contributing these guides you can see the team guidelines here:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/DocumentationTeamInfo/JoinDocTeam

Or to get a wider view of the Documentation Team activities visit this page:

https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/join-the-documentation-team/ where you will also find information about maintaining the LibreOffice Help pages and the documentation wiki.

If you have any questions you are welcome to post them to: documentation@global.libreoffice.org  or you can also join our Telegram group for documentation at https://t.me/joinchat/ALeRuUFCxyZY0wzoddldWQ

The team also gather together in our open to all bi-weekly on-line meeting: https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/tdfdocteam see: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Meetings for dates and times.

Join us! Happy documenting!

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