Who makes LibreOffice? How can you – as a user – get involved in the community? And what can you contribute to the project? Well, we’ll answer all of these questions, and more, in an upcoming online “hackfest” during the LibreOffice conference. This is a virtual event where the world’s foremost LibreOffice experts will be at hand, to answer your questions about contributing to the project. You can see how they work and “how the sausage is made”, as they say!
There are many ways to help out:
Designing the user interface
Improving the features and functionality with C++ programming
Updating the documentation
Translating the app and website
Starting cool marketing campaigns
Confirming bug reports from other users
And much more. By joining a well-known and well-established FOSS project like LibreOffice, you can build up your skillset for future career options. And also meet new people and have fun!
So, do you have a question about contributing? If so, please send your questions to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org by 27 September 2020.
A panel of experts will convene to present on your questions and topics. Everyone is welcome to join and ask further questions. In the case that your spontaneous questions render the experts speechless, answers will be provided after the event. The duration of the event is one hour.
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world’s leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. It’s comprised of a team of highly skilled and motivated people, working on infrastructure, design, documentation, QA, marketing and other tasks. We’re passionate about free software and bringing people into our community.
To grow our volunteer community, in particular for code contributions, we’re searching for
a Development Mentor (m/f/d)
to start work as soon as possible. If you’re interested in the role, which is offered on a part- or full-time basis, you ideally have:
previous experience in remote work
been a long-time contributor to one or more FLOSS communities
excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring – a fluent command of the English language (written and spoken) is expected
coding experience in several FLOSS code bases and programming languages, including LibreOffice
demonstrable C++ coding experience of at least five years, plus active knowledge of at least one more language used in LibreOffice (e.g. Python or Java)
willingness to regularly travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally
self-driven and a good team player; interested in working together with our team
The remote job role involves working from home at your location and includes among other items:
Work with our existing team in the LibreOffice community on topics including:
building relationships between the community and new contributors
identifying and on-boarding new contributors
affirming and encouraging their contribution
encouraging them to join IRC and other communication channels to meet the community
building relationships with domain experts for deeper learning
attracting new contributors by promoting the project
interaction with UX volunteers
Shape and create development mentoring including:
helping to onboard new contributors by
positively reviewing their code contributions
improving their C++ programming skills & design, and coding style
introducing them to our tooling and culture
designing, and define easy tasks for new contributors
maintaining our technical documentation, e.g.
developer guide
wiki articles
code comments
helping to review the results of development tenders produced by TDF
goals-oriented and with a laser-sharp focus to grow excellent LibreOffice core contributors, our perfect candidate will come up with creative ways to find and attract volunteers
Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software. Speaking and writing English fluently is a mandatory requirement.
The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings).
TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, gender, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.
As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.
TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to tender20200701@documentfoundation.orgno later than September 15, 2020.
If you haven’t received feedback by October 30, 2020, your application could not be considered.
LibreOffice 7.0 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early August 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here.
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.0 on Monday July 6, 2020. Tests will be performed on the first Release Candidate version, which will be available on the pre-releases server the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows.
Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Release Candidate (LibreOffice 7.0.0 RC1) will be available until mid July. Check the Release Plan.
During the day there will be a dedicated session to test the new SKIA Graphics Engine integration from 14:00 and 16:00 UTC.
All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki. LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
I am from South Tyrol, and live near the city of Meran/Merano on the mountain side. I studied computer science, and teach informatics, physics and mathematics at the local high schools. In my spare time, I like to go hiking, climbing, and of course programming 🙂
What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?
At the moment I am part of the Macro team, and try to solve some of the bug reports. I don’t remember exactly, but I think that I contributed to about over a dozen of them. Personally, I think macros are not without controversy due to the security concerns, but they are widely used in order to automate some easy tasks.
Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?
In my teaching activity, there’s only a small part where I can really program or solve some challenging problems. So I decided to join an open source project in order to contribute to the community, get in touch with current software lifecycle technologies and to improve or contribute to existing widely used software. To be honest: LibreOffice was the first product which came to my mind.
In addition, I think that local public administrations should not invest only in proprietary software solutions, which abuse their market position.
Anything else you plan to do in the future?
In the future I want to promote LibreOffice for our local high school, and to encourage more students to contribute to open source software. For this reason, I think that the help pages of LibreOffice should be revisited and simplified in order to attract more people to improve and contribute to such a great product.
Thanks to Andreas for all his work! Everyone in the LibreOffice project is welcome to apply as a member of TDF – check out this short video for more info…
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LibreOffice 7.0 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early August 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here. Of course, there’s still a lot more development to come, so more features will be added to that page in the coming months!
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.0 on Monday May 11, 2020. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version, which will be available on the pre-releases server a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.
Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 7.0.0 Alpha1) will be available until end of May. Check the Release Plan.
During the day there will be a dedicated session to test the ongoing work in the SKIA Graphics Engine integration from 14:00 and 16:00 UTC.
All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki. LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
In 2019, LibreOffice celebrated its ninth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well.
Throughout the year, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 6.3 were held on May 9 and July 8 – while those for LibreOffice 6.4 took place on October 15 and December 18.
LibreOffice 6.2
On February 7, LibreOffice 6.2 was officially released after six months of development. It was the first version to showcase the new (but optional) NotebookBar user interface as a non-experimental feature, making it available for all users. The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.
LibreOffice 6.2 also included tidied-up context menus, performance improvements for change tracking, multivariate regression analysis in Calc, and many extra features in LibreOffice Online. A video was produced to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. Here it is:
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LibreOffice 6.3
Later in the year, on August 8, LibreOffice 6.3 was made available. Writer and Calc performance was improved by an order of magnitude based on documents provided by end users: text files with different bookmarks, tables and embedded fonts, large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and Calc files with VLOOKUP load and render more quickly. Saving Calc spreadsheets as XLS files was also made faster.
Meanwhile, the Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface, introduced in LibreOffice 6.2, was made available for Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. It leaves more space for user documents, spreadsheets and presentations on laptops with wide screens. In addition, the new Contextual Single UI was ready for Writer and Draw.
Export as PDF was improved with the support for the standard PDF/A-2 document format, which is required by several organizations for long term file storage. In addition, the design of editable PDF forms was simplified with the addition of the Form menu to Writer.
Finally, a redaction feature was added to remove or hide sensitive information such as personal data before exporting or sharing the file, to help companies or organisations to comply with regulations. As with the previous release, a video was created to demonstrate the new features:
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