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LibreOffice monthly recap: July 2020 – News, events and more…

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

  • At the start of the month, we announced a Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.0 RC1. Yes, the next major release is just around the corner! You can still help us to test it before the official announcement, which is due next week…

  • But we’re still maintaining the LibreOffice 6.4 branch, and on July 2, we announced LibreOffice 6.4.5. It includes over 100 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility and interoperability with software from other vendors.
  • In recent months, TDF and the community have been discussing marketing plans for the next five years. How can we keep the LibreOffice project sustainable in the long term? Volunteers are a huge part of the project and we’re immensely grateful for them, but companies in the ecosystem also write the majority of the source code to implement new features, so it’s important that they prosper too. See the first update and second update.
  • On July 13, we talked to Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman about his work in the LibreOffice community, helping with advocacy and marketing. He recently decided to become a Member of The Document Foundation – welcome on board!

  • Speaking of Members, TDF’s Membership Committee has elections coming up. The mission of the Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes.

  • July 19 marked 20 years of free and open source office suites, as Sun Microsystems announced on July 19 2000 that StarOffice, which it recently acquired, would become free and open source software. This, of course, became OpenOffice, and lives on today in the form of LibreOffice, the most active and developed successor project.

  • With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, many communities are meeting online, such as the Spanish-speaking LibreOffice community. They had a live broadcast with a series of talks, over six hours, covering translations, migrations and LibreOffice Online.

  • The joint openSUSE + LibreOffice conference will take place in October, and we’ve extended the Call for Papers until August 4. Join us, give a talk about your favourite topic, and let’s share knowledge together!

  • Lastly, we talked to Sandra Louvezo, another new TDF Member, about her experiences in the LibreOffice community in Congo. A big thanks to Sandra, and everyone in our growing LibreOffice communities in Africa, for all their great work.

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!

Community Member Monday: Sandra Louvezo

Today we’re talking to Sandra Louvezo, who is helping to spread the word about LibreOffice and FOSS in Congo. Also, she recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I was born on August 31, 1984 in Pointe-Noire, the economic capital of Congo-Brazzaville. I achieved a BAC+3 in Human Resources Attaché at the Magrebin Institute of Science and Technology in Tunis, Tunisia (IMSET) in 2008.

Then I returned to Congo in 2009, where I worked for five years in local companies as an Accounting Assistant – Claims Writer – Head of Life and Health Insurance services at the Huet de Baroquer group, under the H branch in B Congo Insurance. Then I was Director of Human Resources in a service subsidiary and provision of Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) staff for two years.

For the past two years, until now, I have started my own business as a motivational and personal development coach, as well as a nutritional coach and caterer.

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

In Pointe-Noire I belong to a community called “Librists”. Our goal is to help people discover the world of open source software here in Congo – which very few people know about. I am responsible for training people to use the LibreOffice suite, and we have named the training “SPRINT”, which lasts 60 days per component starting from Writer, Calc, Impress etc.

The aim of this sprint is to help users learn the applications, and get their comments, to then bring back to the LibreOffice Francophone community, to which I also belong. Then we can continue to improve LibreOffice.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I decided to become a member in order to raise awareness, mobilize people, and bring LibreOffice to my country and Africa in general. Discovering LibreOffice and open source was a delight for me, and I want to teach others this life lesson: contribute back to open source, and help make the world a better place.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I am training to prepare the next SPRINT, which will start from the end of July to the beginning of August 2020 in several African countries such as: Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, Senegal and Benign. For 60 days, users will learn to use and discover LibreOffice Writer in the form of exercises, and the answers will be returned at the end of ech day.

The goal is to be present, so that each African country discovers LibreOffice and builds a mini community around it, before we start to offer the application to the different companies that have everything to gain from using it.

Thanks to Sandra for all her contributions! Our native language communities are always open for more help – so if you want LibreOffice and its website localised in your language, give us a hand!

openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference Extends Call for Papers

The organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference are extending the Call for Papers to August 4.

Participants can submit talks for the live conference past the original deadline of July 21 for the next two weeks.

The conference is scheduled to take place online from Oct. 15. – 17.

The length of the talks that can be submitted are either a 15-minute short talk, a 30-minute normal talk and/or a 60-minute work group session. Organizers believe shortening the talks will keep attendees engaged for the duration of the online conference.

The conference will have technical talks about LibreOffice, openSUSE, open source, cloud, containers and more. Extra time for Questions and Answers after each talk is possible and the talks will be recorded. The conference will schedule frequent breaks for networking and socializing.

The conference will be using a live conferencing platform and will allow presenters with limited bandwidth to play a talk they recorded should they wish not to present a live talk. The presenter will have the possibility to control the video as well as pause, rewind and fast-forward it.

Attendees can customize their own schedule by adding sessions they would like to participate in once the platform is ready. More information about the platform will be available in future news articles.

Organizers have online, live conference sponsorship packages available. Interested parties should contact ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more information.

A new virtual meeting of the Hispanic Community was held

Daniel Armando Rodriguez writes:

Yesterday, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic LibreOffice Community gathered for the third consecutive month, with panelists who covered different topics related to the office suite.

The event was broadcast live on YouTube. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for just over 6 hours and featured speakers from 6 nationalities, recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.

  • Italo Vignoli, from Italy, one of the founding members of TDF provided a complete overview of the Open Document Format.
  • Olivier Hallot, from Brazil, another of the founding members presented different Translation Tools.
  • Rafael Espinar, from Spain, spoke with Antonio Caba and Francisco Rueda about the impact of migration.
  • Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, presented Migration at the University of Costa Rica.
  • Paul Janzen, from Paraguay, gave a talk on the Migration Experiences of the Philadelphia School in Paraguay.
  • Ameck Bozo, from Venezuela, gave a detailed tour of the creation of a Dashboard in Calc.
  • José Gatica, from Chile, presented the Migration of a vulnerable school.
  • Klaibson Ribeiro, from Brazil, presented LibreOffice Online.
  • Gustavo Pacheco, also from Brazil, spoke about the importance of participating as a member of TDF.

This was, of course, an open event – free and aimed at anyone interested in learning more about LibreOffice. Also, we thank our friend Servio from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live broadcast through YouTube. All the talks are available in the LibreOffice Hispano channel – here’s a playlist:

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New Czech translation of Getting Started Guide 6.4

Zdenek Crhonek from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech translation of the LibreOffice 6.4 Getting Started guide is now available! The history behind this book is quite long: first, another team translated the version 4.2 guide in 2014, but they never fully finished it (didn’t do corrections, publishing etc.) Then they started to update for version 5.1, but never finished the translation. I was not part of the team in these days, so this is what I’ve found out from the mailing lists. Thanks to the CAT (computer-assisted translation) tool OmegaT, we could used their old translations and build upon it. In 2020 we started translation again with version 6.0, but we quickly jumped to version 6.4 and followed the documentation team’s updates.

The translation was a team effort – a big thanks to:

  • Anna Benc
  • Eliška Rolfová
  • Lucie Studená
  • Marcela Tomešová
  • Miloš Šrámek
  • Petr Kuběj
  • Petr Valach
  • Roman Toman
  • Vendula Crhonková
  • Zdeněk Crhonek
  • Zuzana Kašparová
  • Zuzana Pitříková

Great work! Everyone is welcome to join our documentation community. It’s a great way to build up skills for a potential future career in technical writing…

Community Member Monday: Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman

Today we’re talking to Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman from our Malaysian community. He’s a long-time fan of free and open source software, and is helping with LibreOffice advocacy and marketing…

To start off, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I started exploring and using FOSS way back in 2004 (Debian, Red Hat, the BSD family and sticking with Ubuntu till today) when I was studying at the university. From there I started exploring and contributing to Ubuntu, which you can find here, and I was accepted to be an Ubuntu Member, Kubuntu Membes (merits as Ubuntu contributor). Finally I was appointed to be part of the Asia Oceania Membership Board.

A a FOSS community member, I work in a few IT companies in Malaysia and was one of the engineers working at Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC) under Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU). Now I own my own IT company, namely Informology Sdn Bhd. Not stopping there, I continue actively being a FOSS enthusiast in Malaysia. When the cloud computing era came, I was involved by leading Malaysia OpenStack User Group, and I’ve recently been exploring and leading the Endless OS user group for Malaysia.

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

I started the LibreOffice Malaysia Group on Facebook, and I’m planning with the group to finish the LibreOffice Malay translation as soon as possible, with guidance from the Indonesian LibreOffice translation team – so that we can have Malay language support in LibreOffice and Collabora Office.

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

It’s in line with what I’ve done since I started using FOSS: open source advocacy targeted at students, teachers, government staff and the open Source community members in Malaysia. I especially focused on Linux, and office automation like LibreOffice and Collabora Office as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Then, last year in 2019, I managed to participate in the Gnome Asia Summit 2019 in Surabaya, Indonesia where I met a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who are advocating and spreading open source in Indonesia, along with a few awesome TDF members (Ahmad Haris), TDF Board member (Franklin Weng) and GNOME Foundation Staff.

So I asked myself… since I already pitching the Open Document Format (ODF) since I was in OSCC, why not start contributing more to LibreOffice by doing translations? So I challenged myself by applying to become a TDF member, with advice from Ahmad Haris and Franklin Weng.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

Keep spreading and marketing LibreOffice in Malaysia – especially in the government and educational sectors. Give these sectors LibreOffice as an alternative, by not using piracy and a cracked version of Microsoft Office.

Maybe the LibreOffice Malaysia group can suggest to TDF to host the LibreOffice Conference in Malaysia one day in the future!

Thanks Khairul! And indeed to everyone in the Malaysian LibreOffice community. Your work is essential to help spread awareness of LibreOffice across the globe.

Join the LibreOffice community today! Have fun and build up your skillset…

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