LibreOffice is made by volunteers and certified developers across the globe, and today we’re announcing a new system to credit their work and show appreciation: Open Badges. So what are they?
In a nutshell, Open Badges are PNG images that are awarded to contributors for reaching a certain threshold – such as a number of commits to the codebase, or answering questions on Ask LibreOffice. But these images are something special: they contain metadata describing the contributor’s work, which can be verified using an external service. Open Badges are used by other free software projects, such as Fedora.
We at The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – will start issuing customised badges to contributors, who can then proudly display them on websites or social media. And because of the embedded metadata, contributors can use the badges as proof of their work. If you’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice and are in the job market, use your badge to highlight your involvement in a large open source project!
Starting off: Ask LibreOffice contributors
The first set of badges go to the nine people on Ask LibreOffice, our community assistance website, who’ve posted over 100 answers. We’ll be in touch personally with the badges! Their usernames:
Ratslinger
ajlittoz
Mike Kaganski
Opaque
Lupp
erAck
RGB-es
ebot
JohnSUN
Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges awards!
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the second Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.4 on Monday December 23, 2019.
Tests will be performed on the first Release Candidate version, which will be available on the pre-releases server the same day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM) with GTK3 and KDE5 support, macOS and Windows. (Note that it will replace your current installation.)
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 6.4.0 RC1) will be available until mid January, 2020, when LibreOffice 6.4 RC2 will be released. Check the Release Plan.
All details regarding the bug hunting session are available on the wiki. We look forward to – and appreciate – your help!
LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…
Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.
So, what has happened in the meantime? This article is a collection of the work done by the LibreOffice Macro Team in the past few months, as well as any other macro-related things in the project. If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.
Quality assurance work
Tomoyuki Kubota and Alain Romedenne reorganised the macro meta bug, creating several subcategories for macro issues and feature requests.
Wiki docs
Soon after the announcement of the macro team in early September, we were contacted by Nathan Ullberg, who promptly started contributing to the wiki documentation. Nathan is keeping notes on the progress of his work on his wiki user page. Alain is collaborating with Nathan on the wiki effort, which includes creating new articles with example macros, reviewing old ones and translating them from French to English.
Finally, we have to highlight Alain’s presentation from the LibreOffice Conference 2019: Scripting LibreOffice Python macros, aka “Macros Well Kept Secrets”:
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Big thanks to everyone for their contributions and special thanks to Alain for coordinating things and being a tireless macro educator! As mentioned, everyone is welcome to join our efforts to improve macro support in LibreOffice – you don’t need to be a developer. Help us with documentation, bug reports and more – and gain valuable experience on the way!
The Google Summer of Code – aka GSoC – is a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. In 2019, LibreOffice was once again a participating project, and we describe the results here.
Meanwhile, Muhammet Kara from the Turkish LibreOffice community gave a presentation about GSoC on November 8 at YILDIZ Amphitheater M2, Hacettepe University (Beytepe Campus), Ankara – here’s what he had to say:
There were around 40 attendees, mostly from the Computer Science department. The best part was that they were very excited, and asked many questions – and the event took almost two hours instead of the planned 40 minutes. Many of them seemed ‘sold’ at the idea of spending the next summer (or at least one summer, sometime) working on LibreOffice or another free/libre open source software (FLOSS) project, through GSoC.
I also tried to share my adventure as a FLOSS enthusiast, from a volunteer translator to a professional developer working as part of Collabora’s LibreOffice development team. And I am glad to say that they seemed inspired of the story. 🙂
This is an after-event tweet by Hacettepe University ACM Student Chapter, with photos. Oh, and be prepared to hear more from around here regarding LibreOffice/FLOSS activities in the upcoming days. We have more activities in the planning, and hope to share soon. 😉
Thanks to Muhammet and all the participants for their work! Everyone is welcome to join our community and help to improve LibreOffice – see what you can do to make a difference.
