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Behind the scenes at TDF: Openness, transparency and projects

by Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of TDF

Florian Effenberger

With the second quarter being over, the longest day of the year having passed by, and summer vacation time coming up for many of us, it’s time to look back what happened at TDF the first six months of the year. With many projects, activities and developments going on, time has passed by once again at lightning speed, and I want to highlight a few of the things that happened, enabled by our invaluable volunteer contributions, our generous donors, and our wonderful and amazing community, end-users and adopters. In my capacity as Executive Director, I mostly shed a light on the administrative bits of the foundation running, and my staff colleagues will give an overview on their respective areas of working later on.

One of the most noteworthy things for sure is the publication of our annual report, which for the first time since TDF’s existance has been published in English and in German at the same time, a model we want to follow also for the upcoming years. The English version has been polished up by a designer, and will also serve as printed brochure for upcoming events and meetings.

Likewise, we have begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public, to give you an overview on how we spend donors money and what projects we invest in. Accompanied by that is the publication of the board reports on the various area of our project.

Staff-wise, I am very happy that since spring of 2015, Italo Vignoli has been contracted by TDF for marketing and PR, a role he has been filling on a volunteer basis for some time already. Supported by a future marketing intern, Italo will work on press releases in joint cooperation with the community, regular marketing calls and a TDF merchandising online store.

A lot of other projects have been prepared behind the scenes, like our tenders on MozTrap and on LibreOffice UX, where we’re working hard on making them a success just like last year’s Android tender.

Community-Meeting in Essen
Community-Meeting in Essen

On the foundation side, we now have 204 members and even more contributors around the globe. Being a Bavarian, one thing that makes me particulary proud is of course that we welcomed the city of Munich in our Advisory Board early this year.

There’s a lot of things cooking at TDF, and the second half of the year will be at least as exciting as the first one. With the LibreOffice Conference coming up in Denmark, the certification program growing strong and our grant request page online for community proposals, I’m more than excited to see what projects, ideas and new things come up at TDF the next weeks and months.

One of my personal tasks for the rest of the year is to engage stronger again in my native language community. We recently had an exciting community meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, where we also had a chance to exchange thoughts and views with the Italian community, represented by Italo Vignoli. The German community has traditionally been a strong one, so 18 people in total found their way to the meeting. With the setup of regular German community phone conferences, including one dedicated call for the marketing of LibreOffice 5.0, we will work on getting more contributors in and engage in local marketing of LibreOffice – the best free office suite and one incredibly exciting community!

Publication of TDF Ledgers

TDF has begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public. As part of the foundation’s transparency and openness principles, TDF is committed to publishing the accounting ledgers on a regular basis from now on.

Accounting is done by a professional accountant, and the resulting ledgers are slightly anonymized and translated. The style of the ledgers is defined by our tax/accounting requirements and changes are possible only on a limited basis.

You can find TDF Ledgers at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers.

TDF is grateful to all donors and volunteers for the ongoing donations, support and contributions, which make TDF what it is today and contribute greatly to the ongoing success of the LibreOffice community!

Read about The Document Foundation achievements in 2014: download the Annual Report!

TDF ReportThe Document Foundation (TDF) is proud to announce its 2014 Annual Report, which can be downloaded from the following link: http://tdf.io/report2014 (3.2 MB PDF). The version with HD images can be downloaded from http://tdf.io/report2014hq (15.9 MB PDF).

TDF Annual Report starts with a Review of 2014, with highlights about TDF and LibreOffice, and a summary of financials and budget.

Community, Projects & Events covers the LibreOffice Conference 2014 in Bern, Certification, Website and QA, Hackfests in Brussels, Gran Canaria, Paris, Boston and Tolouse, Native-Language Projects, Infrastructure, Documentation, Marketing and Design.

Software, Development & Code reports about the activities of the Engineering Steering Committee, LibreOffice Development, the Document Liberation Project and LibreOffice on Android.

The last section focuses on People, starting with Top Contributors, followed by TDF Staff, the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee, the Board of Trustees, or the body of TDF Members, and the Advisory Board.

To allow the widest distribution of the document, this is released with a CC BY 3.0 DE License, unless otherwise noted, to TDF Members and free software advocates worldwide.

[The German version of TDF Annual Report is available from http://tdf.io/bericht2014].

Behind the scenes at TDF: Localization and Native-Language Projects

Sophie Gautier has been a member of the OpenOffice.org project since its beginning, and then a founding member of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. She is extremely active in the Francophone and international community, and is a staff member of The Document Foundation. She takes care of the French translation of LibreOffice (interface and help), is a member of LibreOffice certification committee and is a leading member of the quality assurance project.

2015 is more than ever a year packed with exciting projects and ideas around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, so we want to continue our behind-the-scenes series, to share achievements with our community and our generous donours, to whom we’d like to express our sincerest gratitude and thanks for their incredible and wonderful support and their invaluable contributions!

The localization team has been very busy translating for the 4.4.x version, a lot of dialogues have been modified, so thousands of strings were touched, moved and need to be translated and validated again.

The L10N team had an important discussion on the workflow and the current workload due to changes on the sources, whether they are needed or purely cosmetic, which resulted in several decisions. The first is that the teams willing to work on master will have a new Pootle project reflecting the changes done there. It will be merged once a month and the template will be updated in Pootle accordingly. This allows us to check the strings much earlier and revert eventually unneeded changes. The teams wishing to work at the branch levels will still be able to do so.

To be able to reach out to developers more quickly and get a better communication between the teams, I attend and report the L10N activities and needs to the Engineering Steering Committee, by attending the weekly calls. For example, the request to have a mechanism that handles the localization of the templates will be provided for 4.5 and strings will be uploaded on Pootle.

The migration to the new Pootle version is going on. We are closely working with the Pootle team to get this done smoothly and to have the whole set of features the L10N team needs. The Deckard addendum will be the next step.

A cross work between the documentation and translation projects has been brought up by Milos Sramek from the Slovak community. They have developed a whole workflow to translate the user guides and to maintain them. After some tests in different languages, we have decided to use it for the whole project and document it on the wiki. This is handled via the OmegaT Project feature and we use the LibreOffice GitHub repository to manage revisions in the .ODT file, which turned out to be really time saving and reducing errors – even if the first work is important, it allows afterwards to only handle modifications needed by new LibreOffice versions. If you are willing to use this workflow for your own translation projects, even if it’s another LibreOffice writing, don’t hesitate to contact us either on the documentation or the L10N list.

Some new languages added to Pootle during the first quarter are: Guarani, Nahualt, Tigrinya, Pashto and a new contributor who will work on Tatar, which was stalled for the moment. Welcome to all of them, keep up the good work, guys!

It is a bit early, but let’s already talk about what L10N and NLPs wanted to discuss during the LibreOffice Conference. I am very happy to see that we will have a large group representing the teams this year! 🙂 If you are active in the L10N or NLPs groups and wish to attend, don’t hesitate to come back to me via e-mail and have a look also at the conference website. We will have workshops, discussions and presentations sharing our experiences, difficulties, tips & tricks, but the most importan,t we will be altogether in the same room 🙂 If you can’t attend, don’t feel sad, we will try to organize a hangout and an IRC chat as well.

TDF has also been a supporter of the Document Freedom Day, an event that will be followed by several groups all over the world. I’ll report about it next quarter. The Brazilian team has launched the 15th edition of its magazine. The Japanese team is, as always, organizing several events, trainings and mentoring during this quarter. Don’t forget to have a look at our calendar to follow the activities and perhaps meet a team exhibiting near your place.

The Document Foundation: the third anniversary

The Document Foundation has been incorporated on February 17, 2012. Today is the third anniversary, and this video is a testimonial of the activity of many members of the fantastic LibreOffice community in representation of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers. Thanks everyone for the wonderful journey.

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TDF welcomes eight new LibreOffice certified professionals

Peer-to-peer review session at FOSDEM in Brussels
Peer-to-peer review session at FOSDEM in Brussels

The Document Foundation welcomes the eight new LibreOffice certified professionals who have successfully passed the first peer-to-peer review during FOSDEM in Brussels: Adriano Afonso from Portugal; Osvaldo Gervasi, Gabriele Ponzo, Enio Gemmo, Sonia Montegiove and Alfredo Parisi from Italy; Douglas Vigliazzi and Valdir Barbosa from Brasil. The eight TDF members have been certified for Migrations and Trainings. Their certification will expire on January 31, 2017.

Reviewers for the first peer-to-peer session have been Marina Latini from Italy, who has attended the eight review sessions; Lothar Becker and Thomas Krumbein from Germany, who have attended four sessions on Saturday morning; Cor Nouws from the Netherlands, who has attended two hangout sessions on Monday afternoon; Eliane Domingos, Olivier Hallot and Gustavo Pacheco, who have attended two hangout sessions on Monday afternoon (it was late morning in Brasil).

tdf-infoprofessionals“Peer-to-peer review sessions are the final step of a rather lengthy certification process, where we discuss with candidates – once we have checked their pre-requisites – about their experience, and we ask to provide the relevant documents to attest their migration or training related activity”, explains Italo Vignoli, chairman of the Certification Committee, who has coordinated the sessions. “For different reasons, we rejected more applications than we have accepted. Some of them are on hold, others were missing the pre-requisites. This ‘funnel’ approach allow to bring in front of the review committee only those people who are likely to qualify for certification, and the peer-to-peer review is the final step to discuss face-to-face with the candidates”.

The eight new certified professionals join the 44 certified developers and the 13 certified migrators/trainers who have been appointed by the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation based on their code contributions, or on their experience and their contribution in setting up or improving the certification program.

Until the end of April 2015 the program is open only to TDF Members. From May 2015, certification will be open also to third parties, provided they meet the pre-requisites and follow a two day training course. LibreOffice Certification Program is extensively described at http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification.

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