LibreOffice Conference 2013 Call for Papers Announced

Berlin, July 5, 2013 – LibreOffice Conference will be held in Milan, Italy, on September 25-27, 2013, at the Department of Computer Science of Milan State University. The Document Foundation invites members and volunteers to submit proposals for papers. Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we want to hear from you.

The Call for Paper page is available at the following address: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2013/en/call-for-papers.
Proposals should be filed by August 4, 2013, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program. Detailed instructions on how to file proposals are available at the following address (and should be followed carefully): http://conference.libreoffice.org/2012/archive/support-information.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:
a) Open Document Format (ODF) Track
b) Interoperability
c) LibreOffice – Development and the future: Technology, API, Extensions
d) Community-Track: Localization, Documentation, etc.
e) Best Practice and Migration: Certification and Support
f) Migrating to LibreOffice in governments and enterprises
g) Building a successful business around LibreOffice

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last either 45 or 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Workshops and panels will last longer (but they should not exceed 90 minutes), and will discuss a topic or an issue. Session will be streamed live and recorded for download.

Open documents formats and LibreOffice at FISL 14

By Gustavo Pacheco

The 14th edition of the International Forum on Free Software FISL 14, from July 3rd to 6th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, will carry several LibreOffice and OpenDocument Formats (ODF) activities. This year, the good news are the participation of Italo Vignoli (Italy) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Germany) who will talk on the adoption of open standards and free software, respectively. Italo will present a lecture on LibreOffice: the History and A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards. Bjoern will conduct the LibreOffice Workshop and will give the lecture LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved and LibreOffice – Continuous community integration.

The Brazilian LibreOffice community will also be in FISL 14. Klaibson Ribeiro will talk about LibreLogo early in Wednesday 3rd, a new feature included in LibreOffice 4 focusing beguinners-level programming teaching. In the afternoon we will run the panel The importance of of the open source public legal frameworks for the ODF ecosystem, where we will discuss the achievements with existing the open document formats bills, the challenge of the execution and maintenance of these regulations and the strategies for the adoption in administrations. On Friday, July 5th Olivier Hallot will run the workshop Modifying the LibreOffice Interface, and will present the development of the new dialog structures of LibreOffice, an old demand from the LibreOffice community. In the afternoon, Eliane Domingos will coordinate the LibreOffice Community Meeting where José Guilherme Vanz and Marcos Paulo de Souza will present their experience after one year hacking LibreOffice coding. At the end of the day the lecture The Rio Grande do Sul State Migration to Open Document Formats will show the ODF adoption case in the State Cabinet office.

For more details, please visit the official FISL page and register yourself for these full days of knowledge and collaboration!
Wednesday July 3rd
11:00 – 12:00

Room P11

Lecture – LibreLogo – See how easy is to start programming

Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges

The Logo programming language, created in the 60’s to help teaching programming by moving a small tortoise in the screen with the command line, will be presented. LibreLogo is an implementation of the Logo programming language inside LibreOffice Writer 4.0. We will show examples on how simple it is to start to program, and how to teach kids, teens and not so young people.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 40T – GNU

Panel – Importance of open documents format public regulation for the ODF ecosystem.

Antonio Augusto Ribeiro Guimarães, Gustavo Pacheco, Italo Vignoli, Klaibson Natal Ribeiro Borges, Vitorio Furusho

In the recent years, the regulation of the preferred use of open document formats for interoperability, specially with respect to the ODF standard, has been a constant issue for IT managers. The goal of this activity is to present and debate with Brazilian and foreign representatives, the challenges of the legal regulation of open formats.

16:00 – 17:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice Project: Getting Involved

Bjoern Michaelsen

LibreOffice is one of the biggest and most important open source projects. Still we actively encourage volunteers to get involved. This talk presents possible entry points for a newcomer to get started and explains how the project takes effort to make your first contribution into the product less intimidating. Building on that, this talk will also showcase what some volunteers managed to archive and finally present you a set of opportunities to easily make your first contribution.
Thursday July 4th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – LibreOffice Workshop

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice workshop will be a hands-on workshop, covering these topics, depending on interest in the audience: – Building LibreOffice on Linux – running test suites – finding and fixing EasyHacks – testing developer builds – using gerrit.libreoffice.org and its build bots – tinderbox.libreoffice.org – bug triage – regression hunting with LibreOffice bibisect (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Bibisect) – whatever LibreOffice development topics come up during the session.

15:00 – 16:00, Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice: the History

Italo Vignoli

The birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, and the growth of the project during the first three years: the new governance model, the development strategy through the numbers and the new features, and the future of the free office suite.
Friday July 5th
10:00 – 13:00

Room 714

Workshop – Modifying the interface of LibreOffice

Olivier Hallot

In this workshop we will show how to transform the decade-old LibreOffice dialogs into a new and modern open source based on GTK + Glade technology. It will also be a hands-on session for developers with abilities to program in C++ and some knowledge of LibreOffice. We aim to motivate hackers to work on the remaining dialogs that are still available for modernization.

15:00 – 16:00

Room 41A – Tux

Lecture – A Reference Protocol for Migrations to Free Software and Open Document Standards

Italo Vignoli

The Document Foundation has developed a reference protocol to ease migrations to free software and open document standards, targeted to enterprises and organizations, which has been thoroughly tested in Italy for the migration of Regione Umbria (Italia) to LibreOffice.

16:00 – 18:00

Room 701

Community Meeting – LibreOffice and Brazil, passion really matters.

Eliane Domingos de Sousa, José Guilherme Vanz, Marcos Paulo de Souza

Brazil has one of the largest LibreOffice user base. Under the coordination of the new developers generation, the Community Meeting of LibreOffice will present the landmark achievements in almost 3 years of existence. Besides the development, we will discuss other important activities of the project.

18:00 – 19:00

Room 41C

Lecture – Migration to open document formats in the Rio Grande do Sul State Administration

Rogério Alves

We will present the implementation case of LibreOffice as standard office suite inside the Cabinet Office to the ITC managers – ITC Forum.
Saturday July 6th
14:00 – 15:00

Room 40T – GNU

Lecture – LibreOffice – Continuous community integration

Bjoern Michaelsen

The LibreOffice has seen a tremendous growth since it was started 2 1/2 years ago, especially in the number of unaffiliated volunteer contributors. This growth came with a constant challenge to (re-)evaluate the communication and coordination means of the project. This talk gives an insight in how coordination in such a massive and distributed project works, but also tries to give some cautious hints what parts of that might apply to smaller projects.

LibreOffice Conference 2013 Proposals

Following our public call for locations, The Document Foundation has received the following two proposals for hosting the LibreOffice Conference 2013, in alphabetical order:

The Document Foundation would like to thank all proponents for their support, which is truly appreciated! Soon, we will start a public vote to determine the location of the 2013 Conference. In the meantime, we invite the community to discuss with the proponents on our discuss mailing list any questions they have.

Thanks again, and looking forward to seeing you in 2013!

Send us your LibOCon pictures!

We would like to publish a collection of images from the LibreOffice Conference 2012. Lots of people at the venue made photos, and we invite you to share them with us. 🙂

You can upload them at

http://conference.libreoffice.org/upload

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Please ZIP them,
  2. put a file with your name
  3. as well as the image license into the archive.

Our preferred license is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). We cannot publish pictures without a license statement and author’s name in the archive.

Looking forward to getting lots of pictures!

Conference Announcements

LibreOffice Conference opens in Berlin

LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of The Document Foundation, has officially opened the 2nd LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org) addressing the authorities and the community members gathered in the capital city of Germany from the five continents.

“As of today, LibreOffice is being used by close to 60 million people. It is the standard free office suite on all major platforms, available in over 100 languages. Large cities and organizations are deploying it very successfully, more and more schools and universities are rolling it out, and there’s not a single month where it is not covered by major media around the globe – because we always have good news to share. The Document Foundation has become a member of leading organizations for free software and open standards, and at the very same time, is widely seen as a the leader in its area, built on strong reputation and credibility. Last but not least, the ecosystem is growing rapidly, as more and more enterprises discover the business benefit of truly free software.”

“We are now a family of thousands of contributors around the globe. I not only have colleagues all over the world, but more important, true friends, and I am honoured to be part of a large family. Everyone with their very own story, their very own background, and their very own skills. Different ages, cultures and languages, all united by one goal: providing the best free office suite ever, and giving power to those who contribute by passion. By living our values day by day, we make possible what we never dared to dream of two years ago.”

LibreOffice Conference 2012 is hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior (http://www.bmi.bund.de) and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (http://www.bmwi.de) of the Federal Republic of Germany, and Freies Office Deutschland e.V. The event is sponsored by Canonical (http://www.canonical.com), Google (http://www.google.com), SerNet (http://www.sernet.de), bitbone (http://www.bitbone.de), Lanedo (http://www.lanedo.com), Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com) and Univention (http://www.univention.de).

The main conference sessions will be broadcasted online, while all sessions will be recorded and made available on the conference website. To access both real time and recorded video, the infrastructure team has created a single webpage at http://conference.libreoffice.org/streams.

LibreOffice 3.6.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. When downloading the software, you might consider about donating some money to The Document Foundation for the development of LibreOffice and the growth of the community, by accessing our donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org.


LibreOffice is booming

Over 2 million downloads in September, over 540 developers,
a community of over 3,000 volunteers from the five continents,
over 100 languages (representing 95% of the world population)

LibreOffice Conference, Berlin, October 17, 2012 – The Document Foundation announces that the German city of Munich is migrating to LibreOffice, following a growing trend of migrations and adoptions worldwide. “After a careful risk-assessment, Munich city council has decided to migrate to LibreOffice. In favour of that decision, among others, was the greater flexibility of the project regarding consumption of open source licenses. In addition, Munich wants to rely on a large and vibrant community for any Open Source product it employs,” says Kirsten Böge, head of public relations.

Just before the city of Munich, a similar announcement was made by the French Prime Minister, who mentioned LibreOffice as a pillar in the overall migration of free software of all government bodies. MimO, the technology group taking care of the migration project, has already certified LibreOffice as the free office suite of choice.

Several other large migrations to LibreOffice have happened or are happening in Denmark (Hospitals of Copenhagen), Italy (Regione Umbria, City Councils of Provincia di Bolzano, and one of the largest IT company in the banking sector), Spain (City of Las Palmas), Ireland (City of Limerick), Greece (Municipality of Pilea Hortiatis) and the US (City of Largo in Florida).

Chicago Public Library deploys LibreOffice on several PCs, as a service for the people who need to create or edit documents, and provides trainings to learn the free office suite.

LibreOffice is developed by a large and diverse hacker community, which has grown from 20 to 550 members in two years. This group is backed by an even larger number of active volunteers taking care of localizations, quality assurance, community development and marketing at global and local levels. Overall, the number of these people is over 3,000, if we take as a measure those who have contributed to the project wiki.

LibreOffice has been downloaded over 20 million times – and over 2 million in September, following the announcement of version 3.6.2 – from The Document Foundation mirror system (over 80% Windows + 10% MacOS), with a large number of additional downloads from software and magazine websites. In addition, LibreOffice is featured on a large number of covermount CDs, which account for other installs. TDF estimates a grand total of 60 million users, half of them being desktop Linux users who get LibreOffice from their distribution repository.

“Looking at these figures, one can hardly believe that it all happened in just two years,” comments Italo Vignoli, Director of The Document Foundation in charge of marketing communications. “During these months I have traveled the world to speak at free software conferences about the project, and I have met hundreds of people who recognize in LibreOffice the legitimate heir of OpenOffice. Today, the numbers we are releasing show that also governments and enterprises share this perception, and support the idea that only a focused independent free software foundation could provide a path forward for the OpenOffice code base.”

LibreOffice 3.6.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. When downloading the software, you might consider about donating some money to The Document Foundation for the development of LibreOffice and the growth of the community, by accessing our donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice Conference: Streaming

LibreOffice Conference live session streaming will be available from http://conference.libreoffice.org/streams, starting from tomorrow at 10AM (CEST, or UTC+2).

There will be 3 live video streams of the talks and presentations:

  • Stream 1 from the Aula (Wednesday through Friday),
  • Stream 2 from the Eichensaal (Wednesday and Thursday) or the Hörsaal (Friday), respectively,
  • Stream 3 from the Konferenzraum 2 (Wednesday through Friday).

In order to choose the sessions to follow, you can access the entire conference program at http://conference.libreoffice.org/program.

Live streaming has been made possible by kind cooperation of Beuth Hochschule für Technik Berlin – University of Applied Sciences, The Document Foundation, and Freies Office Deutschland e.V.