Category: Community

Here at The Document Foundation, we’re always encouraging people to join our projects and community. Contributing to a well-known open source project is a great way to meet new people, have fun, build up skills and experience, and help to make the world a better place!

However, large FOSS projects can be daunting too. Our Get involved page aims to make the on-boarding process for newcomers easier, by breaking the process down into smaller steps, and we plan other improvements to that page.

But today, we’re announcing a new website targeted at potential contributors: What can I do for LibreOffice. This is inspired by What can I do for Mozilla, and much of the work was done by our awesome contributors from Albania – read their blog post about it here.

In “What can I do for LibreOffice”, visitors are asked what they’re interested in, and pointed to resources to get started. So instead of large web pages with walls of text, visitors can click around and find something that catches their eyes. The website source is on Gerrit if anyone has suggestions for updates or additions, and the site can be translated too.

Anyway, click here to check it out – and let us know what you think!

At the beginning of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions all across the project. Well, May has come to a close now, so how many people got sticker packs throughout the month? Check it out…

It’s the best Month of LibreOffice ever, beating the previous one by 10! So congratulations to everyone who won a sticker pack – and thanks so much for your contributions. It’s great to see such a passionate community helping to bring powerful, free and open source software to the world.

Now, how can you claim your sticker pack? Click the 355 above, and if you see your name (or username) on that 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 these:

(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 so that we can add you!

But there is one more thing…

For this Month of LibreOffice, we have a special bonus: 12 sticker winners have also been selected at random to get an exclusive LibreOffice glass mug! It looks like this:

And here are the winners:

• Dave Barton
• DaeHyun Sung
• ve3oat
• @muvon (Mastodon)
• Platterbaff
• Oliver Brinzing
• Adam Kovacs
• Mihail Balabanov
• @RonneyGey (Mastodon)
• Olexandr Pylypchuk
• Seda Stamboltsyan
• Durgapriyanka

Congratulations to you all! We’ll be in touch with details for claiming your mugs…

So, the Month of LibreOffice has finished – but we plan to do another one in November, with another opportunity to get cool merchandise! And, of course, you can join our friendly community at any time and contribute back to the project. Cheers!

May was an especially busy month in the project, with new releases of LibreOffice, events, workshops, interviews and more. Check it out…

• We started with a new Month of LibreOffice. These are twice-yearly campaigns where we encourage people to join our community and help to improve the software. Everyone who contributes can claim a cool sticker pack at the end – and this year, we have some exclusive glass mugs for a randomly selected bunch of winners too! Learn all about it here.

• We’re all looking forward to the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in September, in Spain – but we’re also looking further ahead, to 2020! If you’d like to organise our conference that year, bringing together LibreOffice developers, supporters and users, see our call for locations. Applications are open until the end of June.

• You’ve probably heard of the Google Summer of Code, right? Well now there’s the Google Season of Docs – and LibreOffice is taking part! The goal is to give technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

• In May, we had two new releases of LibreOffice, thanks to our volunteers and ecosystem of certified developers. LibreOffice 6.1.6 was released early in the month, while LibreOffice 6.2.4 arrived on 22nd. Both versions include bugfixes.

• Another event that’s being planned is the First LibreOffice Latin America Conference in Asunción, Paraguay. This will take place on July 19 – 20, and the call for papers is now open. Come and join our community there!

• Meanwhile, our C++ workshops are still going strong – they’re a great opportunity to explore features of the programming language, with the help of experienced LibreOffice developers. The first one this month focused on binary trees, while the second covered binary search trees.

• LibreOffice 6.3 is on the way! Our community is adding and polishing new features – and you can help to make it rock-solid reliable by joining a Bug Hunting Session. Alpha 1 is already available – but more testing versions will be released, before the final public announcement in early August.

• Members of the German LibreOffice community met at Linuxhotel in Essen for a weekend of discussions, ideas, hacking – and great food! They created a list of tasks to focus on in the coming weeks and months, assigned to various members of the community.

• On May 13, we talked to Vera Blagoveschenskaya from the Russian community, about her contributions to the project in Quality Assurance. Later in the month, we also had a chat with Buzea Bogdan who is also helping with QA – along with useful videos showing tips and tricks in the software. A big thanks to both of them for their contributions!

• In another interview, TDF team member Sophie Gautier talked about her new role as Foundation Coordinator. She will continue to organise conferences and calls within the community, but also work on other projects such as the Open Badges system (more on that soon…)

• We’re putting sections of our Annual Report 2018 on the blog! First up is TDF in 2018, followed by new releases of LibreOffice and LibreOffice Online. Stay tuned for more!

• OW2con 2019 is the annual open source event bringing together the OW2 community, technology experts, software architects, IT project managers and decision-makers from around the world. During OW2con 2019 The Document Foundation and LibreOffice Online will be presented during two different talks: “Adding LibreOffice To Your Online Solution”, and “Introducing The Document Foundation”. The event takes place at the Orange Gardens Innovation Center, Paris-Châtillon, on June 12-13.

• In other Paris news, LibreOffice Paris HackFest 2019 will take place on the weekend of July 5-6, at le 137, which is at 137 Boulevard Magenta, Paris 10e, France. The event is sponsored by INNO3, hosting the hackfest in their building, and The Document Foundation, providing reimbursement for travel and accommodation. If you’re in the Paris region, come along and say hello!

• Finally this month, TDF welcomed Adfinis SyGroup to the project’s Advisory Board. Adfinis SyGroup is using LibreOffice for office productivity, in addition to providing professional consultancy to customers with SLA contracts to support migrations from proprietary software to LibreOffice. More recently, Adfinis SyGroup has helped Collabora to start porting LibreOffice to Apple iOS to allow drafting and editing ODF standard documents on Apple iPads.

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!