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Job Search for a Development Mentor (#201711-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks an individual – or individuals part (or full) time – to be

a Development Mentor

to start work as soon as possible. The role requires the following:

  • Self-starting, remote working experience
  • Experience contributing to FLOSS communities
  • Excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring
  • Coding experience (LibreOffice coding preferred)
  • Willingness to travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally

The role involves working from home at your location for at least 20 hours per week, up to full-time and includes among other items:

Supporting existing mentors in the LibreOffice community including:

  • Building relationships between existing mentors and new contributors
  • Identifying and on-boarding new contributors
  • Affirming and encouraging their contribution
  • Building initial relationships with them
  • Encouraging them to join IRC to meet the teams
  • Introducing them to domain experts for deeper learning
  • Helping to educate new contributors by
  • Positively reviewing their code contributions
  • Introducing them to our tooling and culture
  • Attracting new contributors by promoting the project
  • Interaction with UX volunteers

Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software. Speaking and writing English reasonably well 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, which usually take place at 14:00 or 15:00 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, 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 Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than December 5, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by January 11, 2018, your application could not be considered.

LibreOffice Certification is now available to FSF Members

Yesterday, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced that the opportunity to apply for LibreOffice certification for migrations and training is now available to FSF Associate Members. In 2015, TDF began offering LibreOffice certification to certify “individuals actively promoting LibreOffice deployments, thanks to their competence in specific areas” including development and L3 support, migrations to LibreOffice, and LibreOffice training. In 2017, TDF Certification Committee decided to open the certification process to members of other FLOSS projects, starting from those sitting in TDF Advisory Board.

People certified in LibreOffice migrations and training are able to help companies and government offices make the switch away from proprietary office suites, and that raises the value of a deep understanding of LibreOffice. Italo Vignoli, Chair of the LibreOffice Certification Committee, said: “By extending LibreOffice certification to FSF members, we are widening the reach of our program to foster migrations to LibreOffice. In several geographies, the availability of certified professionals has triggered a number of large deployments in public administrations and enterprises.”

Public Money? Public Code!

The Document Foundation joins FSFE campaign

31 organisations ask to improve public procurement of software

 

Digital services offered and used by public administrations are the critical infrastructure of 21st-century democratic nations. To establish trustworthy systems, government agencies must ensure they have full control over systems at the core of our digital infrastructure. This is rarely the case today due to restrictive software licences.

Today, 31 organisations are publishing an open letter in which they call for lawmakers to advance legislation requiring publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. The initial signatories include CCC, EDRi, Free Software Foundation Europe, KDE, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, openSUSE, Open Source Business Alliance, Open Source Initiative, The Document Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland, as well as several others; they ask individuals and other organisation to sign the open letter. The open letter will be sent to candidates for the German Parliament election and, during the coming months, until the 2019 EU parliament elections, to other representatives of the EU and EU member states.

“Because the source code of proprietary software is often a business secret, it radically increases the difficulty of discovering both accidental and intentional security flaws in critical software. Reverse engineering proprietary software to improve or strengthen it is an absolute necessity in today’s environment, but this basic technical requirement is unlawful in many circumstances and jurisdictions. With critical infrastructure such as hospitals, automobile factories, and freight shippers having all been brought offline this year due to flaws concealed within proprietary software, unauditable code is a liability that states can no longer subsidize with special legal privileges without incurring a cost denominated in lives.

Right now, the blueprints for much of our most critical public infrastructure are simply unavailable to the public. By aligning public funding with a Free Software requirement — “Free” referring to public code availability, not cost — we can find and fix flaws before they are used to turn the lights out in the next hospital.” says Edward Snowden, President of the Freedom of the Press Foundation about the “Public Money Public Code” campaign launch.

Public institutions spend millions of euros each year on the development of new software tailored to their needs. The procurement choices of the public sector play a significant role in determining which companies are allowed to compete and what software is supported with tax payers’ money. Public administrations on all levels frequently have problems sharing code with each other, even if they funded its complete development. Furthermore, without the option for independent third parties to run audits or other security checks on the code, sensible citizen data is at risk.

“We need software that fosters the sharing of good ideas and solutions. Only like this will we be able to improve digital services for people all over Europe. We need software that guarantees freedom of choice, access, and competition. We need software that helps public administrations regain full control of their critical digital infrastructure, allowing them to become and remain independent from a handful of companies,” says Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

That is why the signatories call on representatives all around Europe to modernise their digital infrastructure to allow other public administrations, companies, or individuals to freely use, study, share and improve applications developed with public money. Thereby providing safeguards for the public administration against being locked in to services from specific companies that use restrictive licences to hinder competition, and ensuring that the source code is accessible so that back doors and security holes can be fixed without depending on only one service provider.

“Public bodies are financed through taxes. They should spend funds responsibly and in the most efficient way possible. If it is public money, it should be public code as well!”, says Kirschner.

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REMEMBER TO SIGN THE OPEN LETTER

Meeting the Taiwanese community

I have just visited Taiwan to attend COSCUP, meet representatives of the Taiwanese government and the local community, and run a certification session. Generally speaking, it was a very positive trip, because I was able to get a grasp of the activities at every level. Taiwan is definitely one of the strongholds of The Document Foundation.

COSCUP is the annual conference held by the Taiwanese Open source community since 2006. This year, the event has returned to its original location at the National Taiwan University on August 5/6, with a number of community managed tracks. ODF and LibreOffice were featured during the first day, when I was able to present about the advantages of ODF over OOXML to a large audience of Taiwanese people – mostly young students – who asked several questions. Taiwan is one of the countries moving to ODF, so the topic is rather hot.

The meeting with representatives of the Taiwanese government, led by Digital Minister Audrey Tang, was organized on Monday, August 7, in the early afternoon. During the meeting, we discussed the situation of the migrations to ODF in Europe, together with the opportunities and the challenges faced by every government. I learned about the digital strategy of the Taiwanese government, and about the investments they are doing to introduce open source software to the next generations of citizens. Digital Minister Audrey Tang asked about the evolution of LibreOffice in the cloud.

The meeting with the Taiwanese LibreOffice community spanned over a couple of events: a dinner on Saturday night, during which I had the opportunity to taste some real Chinese and Taiwanese dishes (which are rather different from their European equivalents), and a meetup on Monday night, during which I could talk about ODF vs OOXML, to provide some competitive marketing background on the topic. Moving from OOXML to ODF is not easy, not even in countries where the decision is backed by the government like Taiwan. It is therefore important that all community members know the differences between the two document formats and the advantages of ODF in term of interoperability and costs over OOXML.

I would like to take the opportunity of thanking LibreOffice Taiwanese community for the organization of my presence in the island, and congratulate the Taiwanese government for their comprehensive digital strategy to support not only open source software and open standards but also the education of a new generation of digital citizens.

TDF 2016 Annual Report has been published

The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2016 is now available as a PDF document, in three different versions: English Low Resolution, English High Resolution, and German.

Documents can be downloaded from the following links:

English Low Resolution (7.4MB): https://tdf.io/ar2016low
English High Resolution (22.7MB): https://tdf.io/ar2016high
German: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:TDF2016AnnualReportDE.pdf

The annual report is also available for print-on-demand on Lulu, at the following address: http://www.lulu.com/shop/the-document-foundation/annual-report-2016/paperback/product-23265884.html.

New page added: questions and answers about donations

The Document Foundation is very grateful to all contributions to LibreOffice, both in terms of time and money (donations). For the latter, we occasionally receive questions on various topics: the cost of donations, confirmation emails, refunds and rejected credit cards.

Usually we answer these individually, but now we’ve created a dedicated page on this blog with a list of questions and answers:

Click here to view the page

In addition, it can be accessed via the Donate menu in the top-right of the blog. We hope this helps anyone who has issues donating – and once again, a big thank you to everyone who has donated!

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