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Announcing LibreOffice New Generation

Today we’re announcing a new project: LibreOffice New Generation. This isn’t about the software, but about the people behind it. As you probably know, LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of certified developers and volunteers, working on the source code, translations, documentation, design, QA, marketing, infrastructure and other areas.

Well, we want to reach out to even more people, so read on to find out more…

What is this?

LibreOffice New Generation is our project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While we’re proud that our community is diverse and has people from all ages, younger people help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to the project. So we want to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.

Who can join?

Anyone! If you’re a school or university student and use LibreOffice, we’d love to hear from you. What do you use LibreOffice for? How can it be improved? Can we help you to spread the word? Join us and let’s work together to make LibreOffice even better!

But everyone else is welcome to join too. The Document Foundation is a small non-profit, so we’d appreciate all help with bringing younger contributors into the project and helping them to get involved with our teams.

What will you do?

Many students who contribute to free and open source software projects like to have something which confirms their work. At TDF we’ve been issuing Open Badges for community contributions – these are special badges with metadata inside, showing what someone did. So we’d like to start issuing these to younger and newer community members too.

We have other ideas and projects, but we’d like to hear from you about your experiences! What else can we offer? How can we credit and reward contributors for their work? Let us know what you think…

How can I join?

If you’d like to discuss ways to get more younger people involved in the LibreOffice community, join our Telegram group where we can discuss Open Badges and other ideas for LibreOffice New Generation. (For all other discussions and suggestions for LibreOffice, please see the general group.) If you’d like to suggest something directly, email me (Mike) and we’ll have a chat.

We look forward to meeting you, and hearing your ideas and experiences!

The round-the-world trip to fix a bug

A little story: The beauty of planet-wide collaborative work in LibreOffice

Mrs. Vera Cavalcante (@veracape), from Brazil, a long-time contributor for the Portuguese documentation on LibreOffice, was reviewing the translation of the Calc Guide and double-checking the translated text, with respect to the current user interface and the Help pages. Vera noticed that the Help pages on conditional formatting were not correct any more, and reported in the Brazilian team Telegram group (Bugzilla is still very hard for non-native English speakers).

The message hit Olivier Hallot (@ohallot) from the LibreOffice documentation coordination team (and Brazilian community member), who reported the bug in LibreOffice’s Bugzilla, for later fixing. LibreOffice’s outstanding quality depends on good quality and numerous errors reports to be submitted properly, for improvements and fixing defects. There is no point leaving a bug unreported.

The topic was of special interest of Roman Kuznetsov (@kompilainenn) from Russia, who already wrote documentation about conditional formatting. Roman wrote the fix, and submitted a patch in Gerrit (the service that controls the code corrections in LibreOffice)…

…and Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (@fitojb) from Mexico reviewed and approved the patch for merging in the main Help code.

End result: LibreOffice’s Help page fixed!

Community Member Monday: Felipe Viggiano and Zhenghua Fong

Today we’re talking to two people who’ve recently decided to become members of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. First up, Felipe Viggiano…

Hey Felipe, tell us a bit about yourself!

Hello there! I’m writing from the state of São Paulo, in Brazil. I’m an electrical engineer and have been working with LibreOffice for several years. Despite all this time, I started to contribute only a few months ago.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I’m working with the Documentation Team, mainly on the update of the Calc Guide with the new features in LibreOffice 7.0. Working with the team has been a huge learning opportunity, and the other team members are always there for a little help when needed.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

The reason I applied for membership is to try to contribute a little more to the project in other areas.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In the future, I would like to start contributing more with others teams, and with TDF in order to help increase LibreOffice’s success. In my opinion, LibreOffice needs to be better known – we have a great free office solution that attends the majority of the requirements of the general public, but, at least in Brazil, many people are not aware of this!

Next us is Zhenghua Fong, who works on improving LibreOffice’s compatibility with other office suites…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m part of a team of three people from Fuzhou, a coastal city known for its hot springs, in the Fujian province in China. When we are not coding, we like jogging in the nearby park. Every year we have company-wide Half Marathon Run around the main campus. Around 7,000 employees compete in the run and other sporting events.

Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation?

As we’re an education tech company, documents are at the core of our business. LibreOffice works great for us. Recently, we have add a whiteboard feature to our product with the help of LibreOffice Online.

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

Compatibility is the area we are working on. Because large parts of the population still use Microsoft Office-based document formats, it’s important to our users that they are able to open documents and get them right the first time.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice
really need?

Performance. We find the performance of our product has room for improvement, especially when compared against Microsoft Office and WPS from Kingsoft.

Thanks to Felipe and Fong for all their contributions! Our worldwide community is what makes LibreOffice strong – everyone is welcome to join and find out what they can do for LibreOffice!

Czech translation of LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4

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

It’s a bit late for the Christmas gift , but we finished translation of the Calc guide 6.4. As usual it was team work, namely:

Translations: Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Zuzana Pitříková

Text corrections: Marcela Tomešová and Vendula Crhonková

Localised pictures: Roman Toman

Technical support: Miloš Šrámek.

Thanks to all the team, and especially Petr for his amazing amount of translation work, Marcela for her patience with our mistakes, and Roman for his continuous support. The Czech translation of the Calc guide 6.4 is available for download here.

Zdeněk adds that the Czech team is continuing with the translation of the Writer Guide, and is always looking for new translators. Join them, or indeed teams in other languages!

Best Community 2020: LibreOffice at DINAcon

At the recent online DINAcon (Digital Sustainability Conference) in Switzerland, Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation gave a talk about how TDF and the LibreOffice community works.

And guess what: our community won an award at DINAcon too: Best Community 2020! We’re really proud to have such an active, passionate and diverse range of contributors all across the globe – LibreOffice wouldn’t be as popular and powerful today without their help.

So to DINAcon: thank you very much for the award and trophy, which we accept on behalf of the whole LibreOffice community! And to everyone out there working on the many different sub-projects in LibreOffice: thank you so much for everything you do. And hopefully see you some point next year!

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