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LibreOffice monthly recap: December 2018

Here’s our regular recap of events and updates in the last month!

  • At the start of December, we wrapped up the Month of LibreOffice from November – and 345 sticker packs had been awarded, more than any other Month of LibreOffice in history! This reflects the thriving community around the software – learn more about the results here.

  • At our recent conference in Tirana, Albania, we sat down with Muhammet Kara from the Turkish LibreOffice community to talk about FOSS migrations in his home country and why he joined the membership committee. We finished editing the video in early December, so here it is!

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  • Meanwhile, the Taiwanese community held a Bug Hunting Session and Franklin Weng reported back about it. A big thanks to everyone who took part, and helped to make the next release of LibreOffice super reliable!

  • Want to make document compatibility in LibreOffice even better? Well, much of the compatibility – especially with legacy and proprietary file formats, is provided by the Document Liberation Project. So TDF’s marketing team made a quick video explaining how everyone can help:

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  • But we’re still maintaining the LibreOffice 6.1 branch, and released LibreOffice 6.1.4 on December 18 – it provides over 120 bug and regression fixes over the previous version.
  • Finally, we wrapped up the year with the LibreOffice 2018 Christmas Quiz! See how much you know about the software, its history, and the community behind it…

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!

LibreOffice community events: Cyprus and Japan

Happy new year! But before we really get into 2019, here are a couple of short event reports from our LibreOffice communities around the world, for events in December 2018. A big thanks to the organisers for their work, and the participants – you’re all doing a great job to boost the community, improve LibreOffice, and share information!

Cyprus: METU NCC LibreOffice Event(s) 2018

During the last weekend of the year (December 28-30), there was a series of events at METU NCC (in Cyprus), organized by the METU NCC ACM Student Chapter. The number of attendees at the seminar was much lower than the last year, probably because of the holiday season, but interaction/result efficiency of the workshop/hackfest was better than the last year. Most of the attendees were from the Computer Engineering department.

All attendees completed the “getting started” part of LibreOffice development. Some of them submitted their patches to Gerrit, and some are preparing to do so. Here are the event pages on on our wiki: METUNCCLODev2018 and METUNCC2018.

Japan: Kanto LibreOffice Offline meeting 2018.12

On 13th December, at the Yahoo! Lodge (1-3, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), LibreOffice community members who are usually far away from one another met up for a chance to interact. At this event, participants had a question-and-answer session about translations, discussed some other topics, and prepared slides for the following day. Attendees included: Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki, Masaki Murakami Tomas Kapiye (from Namibia), Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi (Rwanda), Hatem Wasfy(Egypt) Rin Nakamura and Atsushi Ueda. Here’s the event page (in Japanese).

Japan: Open Source Conference 2018.Enterprise

On the following day, the LibreOffice Japanese team did a seminar. This time, the speakers were Tomas Kapiye, Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi and Hatem Wasfy(Egypt). Event page (also in Japanese). One of the talks was about “How African students contribute to LibreOffce” – click here for the slides, and here’s a video of it:

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And some photos from the Japanese events:

Open Document Editors DevRoom at FOSDEM 2019: Call for Papers

FOSDEM LogoFOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and takes place each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2019, it will be held on Saturday February 2, and Sunday February 3.

The Open Document Editors DevRoom is scheduled for Saturday, February 2 (from 10:30AM to 7:00PM, room UB2.147).

We are inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, tools, extensions and adoption-related cases. Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

The length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM19.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pentabarf).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 24, 2018. Accepted speakers will be notified by Thursday, December 27, 2018. The schedule will be published on Monday, December 31, 2018.

Recording Permission

We will record and stream all main tracks, devrooms and lightning talks live. The recordings will be published under the same licence as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). If, exceptionally, you believe there is a legitimate reason why your presentation should not be streamed or recorded, you must seek our agreement before submitting it.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree to have your presentation recorded and published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to be recorded and to have recordings – including slides and other presentation related documents – published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.

Fundraising, December 11

A picture of contributors attending LibOCon in Tirana, during a break. Most of them could travel to Albania thanks to the economic resources made available by our generous donors. Consider a donation to LibreOffice, to support our contributors traveling to events to talk about LibreOffice and ODF: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

Fundraising, December 9

Thanks to the resources made available by our generous donors, we can organise workshops to educate volunteers about the migration process to LibreOffice and Open Document Format. If you support our activity, you should consider a donation to grow the project and extend our activities to more geographies.

Fundraising, December 8

Consider a donation to the LibreOffice project, to allow the production of swag for free software advocates, volunteers and users, to promote freedom in personal productivity and office documents

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