Category: Foundation
Annual Report 2019: LibreOffice Conference
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. Every year, it takes place in a different country and is supported by members of the LibreOffice commercial ecosystem.
In 2019, the conference was organized in Almeria by the Spanish community, and took place from Tuesday, September 10 to Friday, September 13. Most of the conference took place in the Universidad de Almeria, next to the sea, but some social events and meetups were held in the city itself.
Over 100 people from across the globe attended the conference; for several people, it was their first LibreOffice Conference and therefore the first time they could meet other community members in-person.
On Tuesday, before the main conference presentations got underway, there was a community meeting. Various members of the LibreOffice community joined for informal talks about marketing and localisation of the software, and what we can do to bring more people into the project.
Conference Tracks
Wednesday kicked off with the opening session: a welcome and introduction from the university’s staff; the “state of the project” (summarising the last 12 months of activity in LibreOffice); quick introductions to the TDF team, Board of Directors and Membership Committee; and messages from the sponsors.
During the conference, there were over 70 talks, workshops and feedback sessions on all manner of topics. Some talks focused on technical aspects, such as continuous integration, build systems and debugging, while others were geared towards the community and other non-technical matters – for instance, getting new contributors, how the Membership Committee works, and reports from events in Asia.
In addition, community members and developers gave talks about LibreOffice Online, the PDF export feature, SmartArt editing in Impress, reproducible builds, and a neural machine translation plugin for the suite. Videos of most of the presentations – and a quick summary of the whole conference – are available on TDF’s YouTube channel as a playlist:
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Additional Events
Outside of the conference tracks, various social events and meetups took place over the four days. On Tuesday evening we had a welcome party outside the accommodation, with drinks and light snacks. A beach dinner party was held on Wednesday, with more great local food to try, while a hackfest took place on Thursday, giving developers the opportunity to work shoulder-to-shoulder and discuss ideas in person.
On Friday, the conference organisers took us on a visit to the Alcazaba – the city’s castle – parts of which date back around 1,000 years. We had an entertaining guided tour with excellent views over the city as the sun set. Once the tour had finished, many people headed back into the city to sample tapas. Finally, on Saturday there was another guided tour, this time through the city’s historical downtown area.
So much of this was made possible thanks to your generous donations. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!
Annual Report 2019: The Document Foundation’s activities
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
2019 was a busy year for The Document Foundation, with elections for the Chairperson and Deputy, new staff members, and other activities.
Election of new TDF Board of Directors
The Board of Directors (or “BoD”) is the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the main administration of the Foundation’s projects and teams. Directors are directly elected by Community Members. The Board of Directors consists of seven (7) members and two (2) deputies. The Board of Directors may launch any other teams or committees ad hoc if necessary. In December, an election was held for a new Board.
Gabriele Ponzo, Chairman of TDF’s Membership Committee, announced the results:
The vote preliminary results were in conflict with § 8 IV of our statutes, as three candidates – Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Jan Holešovský – have the same affiliation. The elected candidates and the membership committee discussed the options to resolve the conflict and Jan Holešovský decided to not accept the role. The Membership Committee would like to thank Kendy for his support in this and especially for his longtime work in the board!
Elected as member of the Board of Directors, in this order, were: Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Franklin Weng, Daniel Armando Rodriguez, Cor Nouws, Lothar Becker and Emiliano Vavassori. Elected as deputies of the Board of Directors were: Nicolas Christener and Paolo Vecchi.
Advisory Board members and meetings
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Members are the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), UK Government Digital Services (joined in 2019), City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), BPM-Conseil, Kopano b.v., GNOME, Google, Adfinis SyGroup (joined in 2019), RPA RusBITech, KDE e.V., the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Collabora, CIB Software and Red Hat.
Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, software and community, and described plans for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s activities, and various ideas and proposals were discussed. TDF would like to express its thanks to all Advisory Board members for their help.
New staff members
In 2019, two new staff members joined The Document Foundation’s team. Ilmari Lauhakangas (aka “buovjaga”) was well known in the community for his work in Bugzilla, and joined TDF as a Development Mentor. He described his work and plans in an interview here on the blog.
In addition, Stefan Ficht joined as an Administrative Assistant, helping Florian Effenberger (Executive Director) and the rest of the team with various tasks.
Highlights of activities
Throughout the year, TDF supported various campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, on February 14 we joined the Free Software Foundation Europe’s campaign “I love Free Software”. This is “the perfect opportunity to say thank you to the contributors of the various Free Software we love: developers, translators, designers, testers, or documentation writers, of huge software projects – or smaller ones.”
Similarly, we backed International Women’s Day on March 8, raising awareness against bias. Free Software projects tend to be heavily male-dominated, but our community is trying to be more open and inclusive.
In May, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced “Open Projects”, the first-of-its-kind program that creates a more transparent and collaborative future for open source and standards development. Open Projects gives communities the power to develop what they choose–APIs, code, specifications, reference implementations, guidelines– in one place, under open source licenses, with a path to recognition in global policy and procurement. TDF supports this effort, along with OpenDocument Format (ODF) Advocacy.
October 12 was the International Day Against DRM – Digital “Rights” Management, but many argue it should be called Digital Restrictions Management.
DRM is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. When a program is designed to prevent you from copying or sharing a song, reading an ebook on another device, or playing a single-player game without an Internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. If we want to avoid a future in which our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with digital media, we must fight to retain control of our media and software. The Document Foundation supports “Defective by Design”, a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that targets Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors.
So much of this was made possible thanks to your generous donations. If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!
Annual Report 2019: LibreOffice in 2019
(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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This was all possible thanks to help from hundreds of people around the world. Donate to The Document Foundation to support our community, or jump in and give us a hand!
TDF new Board of Directors
The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation has just started the two year term on February 18, 2020. Members are: Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens, Franklin Weng, Daniel Rodriguez, Cor Nouws, Lothar Becker and Emiliano Vavassori. Deputies are: Nicolas Christener and Paolo Vecchi.
Five people have been elected for the first time to the Board of Directors: Daniel Armando Rodriguez from Posadas in Argentina; Lothar Becker from Karlsruhe in Germany; Emiliano Vavassori from Bergamo in Italy; Nicholas Christener from Bern in Switzerland; and Paolo Vecchi from Luxembourg (in Luxembourg).
During the first meeting of the Board of Directors, the nine members have elected Lothar Becker as Chairman and Franklin Weng as Deputy Chairman. In the meantime, also the responsibilities and areas of oversight have been discussed and decided.
At the same time, six people – who have served as board members and deputies during the previous term(s) – have left the board, but will continue their activity as TDF Members: Marina Latini, Chairwoman; Björn Michaelsen, Deputy Chairman; Eike Rathke, Member; and Jan Holešovský, Simon Phipps and Osvaldo Gervasi, Deputies.
Each one of these six people was responsible for several BoD activities:
- Marina Latini: QA, Documentation, and Certification (and other business development activities) after four years of service (BoD);
- Björn Michaelsen: Releases (including schedules), Events, and Affiliations after eight years of service (BoD);
- Eike Rathke: Development, and Contracts/Legal (hiring, taxes, compliance, GDPR, trademarks and brands) after eight years of service (BoD/MC);
- Jan Holešovský: Infrastructure, and Documentation after six years of service (BoD/MC);
- Simon Phipps: License, Affiliations, and Contracts/Legal (hiring, taxes, compliance, GDPR, trademarks and brands) after six years of service (BoD/MC);
- Osvaldo Gervasi: Documentation, and Native Language Projects (localization, marketing, non-English QA activities, etc) after four years of service (BoD).
Being a Board member means donating each year several weeks of activity to TDF – for full day face-to-face meetings (twice a year, at FOSDEM in Brussels and LibOCon), and for bi-weekly calls (which usually last a couple of hours) – to manage the foundation and administer the budget, mostly based on donations.
We are deeply grateful to all of these for their dedication, contribution to decision making and for all of their volunteer time spent in BoD duties, as well as for their ongoing contribution to the project.
Welcoming the new Board of Directors at The Document Foundation
In December, members of The Document Foundation voted for a new Board of Directors. The Board is the main administration of the Foundation’s projects and teams – including LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. The new Board will begin work after FOSDEM in February – and there are some new faces to welcome! Let’s hear from them…
Daniel Armando Rodriguez
I have been working voluntarily with TDF since January 2011 and I am a member since 2013. Whenever possible I try to evangelize regarding the advantages of adopting the ODF standard and LibreOffice as an office suite.
Considering the number of people living in this region of the world, I consider the need to add more volunteers to the community and, eventually, more members to the foundation to be a continuous effort. A significant weakness has to do with the language barrier as the number of English speakers in this part of the continent is relatively low. For this reason, I translate and publish on the Hispanic blog press releases, interviews and articles that help raise awareness of the strategic importance of adopting free tools and open standards. I work in a high school with technical orientation all day. I live in Misiones, Argentina (northeast of the country), an small province between Paraguay and Brazil.
I’m averaging the 40’s, father of two, a boy and a girl, and live and I’ve been living in a couple for almost 20 years.
Emiliano Vavassori
I am a senior system administrator, employed in a small company based in Bergamo, in the North of Italy, with its core business in providing ICT services for SMB companies. In my job, I’m mostly without any relation to LibreOffice – we install it on some customer’s PCs, but at least for the moment we don‘t have any migration process/anything bigger planned.
My operating system of choice is GNU/Linux since 2001 and from the same days I advocate FOSS and openness whenever possible, both in public events and in the business. Lately I was convinced that also open formats should have their own share of advocating so I am trying to do that as well. I am actually in the Board of both BgLUG (Bergamo Linux Users Group) and LibreItalia (Italian local “chapter” of TDF), but I am/was involved in a lot of other organizations, mostly with goals in FOSS advocacy.
In the last few years, I was involved in FOSS advocacy also inside schools, founding and leading the LibreSchool Project (www.libreschool.org) with a group of friends and colleagues from my LUG. I hope my experience would be of help inside TDF Board of Directors; I am pretty sure that I will also learn a lot.
As soon as I have been involved with TDF, I have been greeted by a full lot of passionate and welcoming people who worked hard to make yourself feel at home inside TDF and, sharing the same spirit, I would like to drive the efforts on the next two years within the BoD to make LibreOffice and The Document Liberation Project shine even more. My goals inside the Board will be mostly facilitating community interactions and activities, community inclusion and lowering the initial barriers to becoming a community member and contributor, which I can feel is still pretty high.
I would like to provide my direct help inside the TDF Board of Directors dealing with infrastructure (as it may seem legitimate by my job), marketing, event organization and native language projects.
Lothar Becker
This is a logical consequence – I think – of my long-term contributions to the project. A lot of you know me as owner of .riess applications, which was the first partner of Sun for doing migration business with StarOffice/OpenOffice nearly 20 years ago.
You might also know me from my contributions with activities for the national and international ecosystem, developing the certification process for LibreOffice professionals with others, where I nowadays serve as volunteer co-chair of the certification committee.
This gives me the chance to give something back for a lot of things I got out of this project. It‘s not just in the sense of making business, but in the sense of experiencing a healthy and powerful community of an open source project. As I’m also engaged in the German-based Open Source Business Alliance as speaker of the working group of public affairs and co-speaker of the working group for interoperability, there are a lot of topics where I can leverage each engagement through the other in the interest of all.
Helping and driving activities in the sense of growing local communities internationally (India, Africa, Asia, as well as European communities for recovering) and activating more exchange of ideas between the community and the board are some of the challenges I see for the next board period.
Nicolas Christener (deputy)
I’m Nicolas Christener, living in Switzerland, married, love skiing & music and I was born between RFC 812 and 813.
I currently work for Adfinis SyGroup which is a company delivering services (engineering, managed services, development) around F/OSS software. We partner with Collabora and together with them we brought LibreOffice to iOS.
I helped to organize LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Switzerland, the company I work for hosts some TDF servers and lately I was busy to help make the iOS app a reality. I contributed comment translations (de -> en) in the code, filed many bugs and convinced users and organizations to use LibreOffice.
I was also appointed by the current Board (which I’m not part of) to help start the The Document Collective (TDC). This transitional group only bootstraps the legal entity and I won’t automatically be involved in the future entity.
I believe that I have a good understanding of the enterprise requirements and am very community oriented which gives me a well balanced view where and how we could improve LibreOffice for the good of all of us.
Paolo Vecchi (deputy)
I’m based in Luxemburg and my two organisations, Omnis Systems Ltd (UK) and Omnis Cloud Sarl (LU), are specialised in the promotion of Open Source and Free Software platforms. During the last years, I wrote many articles promoting Open Source, Free Software and naturally LibreOffice.
Many of you may know me also from FOSDEM and LibOCon. I’ve been a part of the working group that succeed in convincing the UK Government to adopt ODF as their standard file format, convinced the City Council of Reggio Emilia to upgrade to LibreOffice and contributed in writing the Manifesto for Technological Sovereignty with the City Council of Barcelona – just to mention some of the activities.
I’m contributing to the LibreOffice project by investing time and resources to work with the private and public sector organisations showing them the social, ethical and economical benefits of replacing proprietary products with Open Source platforms and open standards.
With my new venture in Luxembourg I decided to lead by example, so I’ve setup a new “Sovereign Cloud”, providing resources and a set of free services to individuals and local non-profits. I want to show to local institutions that with Open Source platforms it’s possible to compete directly against the big players and that this change is not as difficult and expensive as they want us to believe. The services I’m providing will also be used to further promote LibreOffice, both desktop and On-Line.
I want to share my expertise with the board and bring in my passion for Open Source and Free Software.
Full list of the Board of Directors
Elected as member of the Board of Directors, in this order are:
- Michael Meeks
- Thorsten Behrens
- Franklin Weng
- Daniel Armando Rodriguez
- Cor Nouws
- Lothar Becker
- Emiliano Vavassori
And elected as deputies of the Board of Directors are:
- Nicolas Christener
- Paolo Vecchi
Want to become a member and vote in future elections? Check out this video…
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