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Annual Report 2020: Website, blogs and social media

We use our website, blogs and social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join the LibreOffice community

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

Social media

In January 2020, our Twitter account had 29,340 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 36,996. Our most popular tweets were for major releases, but we also tweeted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.

In addition, we focused not only on our own tweets, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice ecosystem and community members. We liked and retweeted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we used automatic tweeting tools to post daily LibreOffice tips, using the same content from the “Tip of the day” box in the app itself.

On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2019 we set up https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice and started “tooting” content, often more focused on technical users, compared to our tweets and Facebook posts. In 2020 we worked more on expanding our activities here, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 3,297 to 4,879.

Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 56,095 page likes to 58,516. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards newer mobile applications. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.

YouTube channel

Our YouTube channel grew from 9,975 subscribers and 1,587,341 video views in January 2020 to 12,807 subscribers and 2,042,731 video views by the end of the year. The LibreOffice 7.0: New Features video (a fantastic production by the Indonesian community) amassed over 120,000 views – while the video for LibreOffice 6.4 had over 60,000. We also added some presentation videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2019.

Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who produced a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using LibreOffice.

TDF website (documentfoundation.org)

The Document Foundation’s website provides general information about the foundation (overview, statutes, code of conduct, financials and reports) and its governance (board of directors, membership committee, members, advisory board, and engineering steering committee), and about LibreOffice certification, including a list of certified developers, and professionals for migrations and trainings.

During 2020, the website was visited 146,261 times, with 196,802 page views. Continent-wise, the largest chunk of visits were from Europe (57%), followed by North America (22.8%) and Asia (12.4%). And for operating systems: the most visits were from PCs using the Windows (64.1%) operating system, followed by macOs (9.2%) and GNU/Linux (9.0%), while for browsers: Chrome had (38.4%), followed by Firefox (22.1%) and Microsoft Edge (14%).

LibreOffice website (libreoffice.org)

The LibreOffice website provides information about the office suite and the document format, the various download options, how to get help, how to contribute to the project, events where users can get to know LibreOffice, and how to make a donation to support the project and the community.

In 2020, we added a language selector to the top-right bar of the website. This was implemented in response to a demand from the native language projects: many website visitors, using languages across the world, thought that the site was only available in English.

Even though we have a dedicated page listing the native language projects and their respective websites, it’s hard to find. So we added a bar at the top, with some of the most-used languages to attract attention, and a link to a page listing all language versions of the website.

Meanwhile, work progressed on a redesign of the website. LibreOffice’s current website has been largely the same for several years, and while initially it looked fresh and modern, it needs to be updated – especially to remove clutter and complexity, and work better on mobile devices. Volunteer Christine Louie helped to push this forward, and other volunteers joined in with designs and collecting feedback from users. We hope to show the results of this work in 2021.

During 2020, the English LibreOffice website was visited 19,939,066 times, with 47,589,717 page views. Most visits were from Europe (53.4%), followed by Asia (16.7%), North America (15.8%) and South America (10.3%), from PCs using the Windows operating system (83.1%), followed by macOS (6.6%) and Linux (3.7%), and the Chrome browser (49.3%), followed by Microsoft Edge (18.4%) and Firefox (17.9%).

Blogs

TDF’s blogs (such as this one) are essential for communicating activities inside and around the project, including new releases of LibreOffice, community events and support for other free and open source initiatives. In 2020, they were used to post regular interviews with community members and provide updates from team members about documentation, marketing, QA, design and more.

Blogs were also maintained by various native language communities including Japanese, French, Spanish, German and others. Thanks to the hard work of community members, we had press releases, tips and other articles translated into many languages, and picked up by local media organisations.

These native language blogs complement the information provided by the main blog in English, and by the two blogs managed by members of the design and the quality assurance projects, which provide updates about activities for the upcoming major releases.

In 2020, the blog had 184,538 page views (146,170 unique page views). The press releases for LibreOffice 6.4 and 7.0 were the most popular posts, followed by posts for minor bugfix releases.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

Hossein Nourikhah joins the TDF team as Developer Community Architect

Next week, Hossein Nourikhah will join the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, as Developer Community Architect. Hossein is a developer, university lecturer and FOSS advocate. He writes programs, teaches programming to students, and is an advocate for the use of free software applications, because they have a huge positive impact on the quality of our life by providing the essential freedoms that we all deserve.

Hossein has a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Isfahan University of Technology, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Amirkabir University of Technology, also called the Tehran Polytechnic. Since 2016 he has been an instructor at the Amirkabir University of Technology, teaching various courses including C/C++ programming, operating systems, software design, and many others.

Hossein started programming in BASIC and Pascal when he was 12, and after two and a half decades he is still involved in programming for fun and profit. He has worked with several programming languages, including C/C++, Java, Pascal, PHP and many more.

Industry experience

In addition to the university activities, including teaching and research, Hossein has several years of experience in the industry, working at various software/hardware companies as a C/C++/Java programmer – and lately as a software team manager and lead developer.

Hossein’s work experience ranges from web development with PHP to industrial application development with C++/Qt. He considers Qt a great platform for C++ software development, and he likes it very much as a clean and lovely tool.

Hossein has worked with many programmers as mentor, helping them to improve and reach their potential in software development by better understanding programming languages, libraries and tools. He feels great when he can empower other people, also because this helps him to expand his knowledge and understand things much better than before.

As Developer Community Architect, Hossein will be responsible for attracting new contributors to the LibreOffice project by identifying and onboarding new potential developers, building relationships between them and the community, and introducing them to TDF’s communication channels – where they will meet fellow co-hackers. He will encourage everyone’s contribution, and show community members ways to grow by bringing the more skilled contributors in contact with existing experts in the various fields for even deeper learning.

We’re happy to have him on board, and look forward to working with him!

100 Paper Cuts as a new student mentoring activity

Just before the pandemic, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation approved a budget to launch an educational program targeted to universities, where students at selected tech schools would receive an economic incentive to promote LibreOffice amongst their peers, with the objective of increasing the number of young contributors both in source code development and in other areas. Unfortunately, the pandemics has forced all universities to stop all collateral activities, and this has resulted in the program being frozen for over one year.

Although the situation is not yet back to normal, we have the opportunity to mentor a student in Turkey. Muhammet Kara, a member of the MC and a Collabora full time developer, will mentor Ahmet Hakan Çelik, an undergraduate computer science student at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, who will be working on 100 Paper Cuts – a list of bugs and enhancement requests relating to LibreOffice’s user experience – during June and July, trying to solve as many issues as he can. The target is to collect 10 points.

This is a first step in the direction set before the pandemic. We are planning to make similar announcements soon.

After the summer, if the academic activities will be back to normal – although the recover will be slow, and will have to cope with entirely new regulations – The Document Foundation will be able to get back in touch with the universities to start the planned Ambassador Program.

LibreOffice Documentation Team Activities in 2020

In 2020, the documentation community released many updated guidebooks, translated them into several languages, and participated in the Google Season of Docs

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

New and translated guides

In January 2020, just before release of LibreOffice 6.4, the Documentation Team was proud to announce the Math Guide 6.4, an update of the previous version (4.0), updated to cover all of the innovations included in the latest release of the software. The guide was updated by Roman Kuznetsov and revised by Dave Barton from the documentation community. This was followed by the Calc Guide 6.2, a long-awaited update of the old Calc Guide 4.4.

In May, the guide to Base for LibreOffice 6.2 was released, covering, LibreOffice’s database component. It was updated by Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo. Another update in May was the Getting Started Guide 6.4 – the introductory guide for the latest LibreOffice 6.4, aimed to the general public interested to quickly get familiar with the software. It’s available as a PDF for offline reading, and ODT (OpenDocument Text) for editors and translators.

In summer, the Documentation Team announced the availability of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the drawing tool of LibreOffice. The guide was updated from the existing release (4.3) and include all the improvements developed since early 2014, when the last version of the guide was published.

Then there was the LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the spreadsheet tool. It was also updated from the existing release (6.2) and included all of the improvements developed in Calc since then.

In October, the Math Guide 7.0 was published – being the first guide based on LibreOffice 7.0. The effort was mostly carried by Rafael Lima and reviewed by Jean H. Weber. The new guide covers were designed by Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen. The final publication was carried by Olivier Hallot. This was followed by the Calc Guide 7.0, a team effort of Steve Fanning, Gordon Bates, Kees Kriek, Annie Nguyen, Samantha Hamilton, Olivier Hallot and Jean Hollis Weber, coordinated by Felipe Viggiano.

Many guides were also translated in to various languages, thanks to our worldwide communities. For more information on their work, and the specific guides that they translated, see the “Native Language “Projects” section of this Annual Report.

Google Season of Docs

For the second year in a row, The Document Foundation was accepted as an organization in the Google Season of Docs, a programme whose goals are to give technical writers an opportunity to participate in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

In 2020, TDF’s documentation community offered a wide range of projects for technical writers, and extended the reach by providing projects for e-learning, mathematical documentation and code-oriented documentation.

TDF received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, TDF accepted the application of Ronnie Gandhi, a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Ronnie worked on improving the descriptions for Calc’s functions, adding statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification. Each function was also supplemented by extra use cases, illustrations and external references (where applicable).

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description on The Document Foundation’s wiki. Thanks to Ronnie for all his work, and the mentors for assisting him on his journey.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

TDF Annual Report 2020

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2020 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in three different versions: low resolution (4.7MB), medium resolution (18MB) and high resolution (24.7MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April.

The 54 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates.

All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from all over the world. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay.

Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address:

You will learn that our jubilee year was one of the most successful in our history. With all activities that took place, despite the situation that we could rarely meet in-person, it is really really incredible how the local communities and all supra-national activities carried on. And furthermore we grew in every aspect: our community base has more contributors than ever, and we had an impressive number of releases of LibreOffice, with a lot of code contributions – especially for the new major release of LibreOffice 7.0. And last but not least, the financial report of the foundation shows a year better than ever.

Certainly, we also had some shortfalls last year, starting with the lack of personal meetings and the consequences in the relationships between members – but also with changes and moves in the community and its ecosystem within. And let’s not forget the members of the community who suffered from bad health because of the pandemic situation. But overall, we could feel lucky and proud coming out of this year strengthened as described in this annual report. For all shortfalls, we are working hard in all TDF bodies (the Board, the old and new Membership Committee, the Advisory Board, the team led by Florian Effenberger), with the whole membership as well as national and international parts of the community.

So for all these activities, code and non-code contributions, personal engagements and donations we truly say a big THANK YOU, thank all of you for being with TDF in such a special year for every one of us.

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