Category: Interviews

Members of The Document Foundation help to steer the LibreOffice project and community. Today we’re talking to Petr Valach from the Czech community…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I was born in Brno, but for nearly 30 years I’ve been living in Prague. I work for a software company where I am member of a mobile applications project. But IT isn’t my only hobby. I do lots of things – personally, astronomy and physics are the most important for me. There is nothing quite so interesting. And I am happy when astronomical or astronautical institutions (for example, the International Space Station) use free and open-source software.

I was member of the scout movement, so scouting is one of my “hobbies” too (it’s not a hobby, but lifestyle). In the Czech Republic, there is something special, a mixture of pure scouting with the education system of our boys’ book author, Jaroslav Foglar. He lead his scout group called The Boys from Beaver River for 60 years and wrote over 20 books, which are bestsellers. Indeed, Jaroslav Foglar is the most successful author in the Czech Republic, who directly or indirectly influenced literally everybody here. I am a member of the community associated around him, and member of Foglar’s association. Recently we’ve had meetings in the Foglar group clubhouse every month.

I am a member of the editors of OpenOffice.cz (focused on LibreOffice and OpenOffice.cz) and LinuxEXPRES (focused on free and open-source software generally). I am lead editor at ExoSpace.cz, which supports these magazines and websites, the Czech community around LibreOffice, other astronomical and astronautical magazines and more.

Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation (TDF)?

I think that I can improve my work by being am member of TDF. Membership gives my work more importance. And I am in connection with other people – and it is very important to be informed. So I believe that I will contribute to the foundation by membership.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

As mentioned, I am member of the OpenOffice.cz editors and I propagate LibreOffice via ExoSpace.cz. I try to support LibreOffice via this media – I try to support members of TDF during conferences and so on. But the most important thing is that I use LibreOffice and learn more and more about it; LibreOffice is absolutely my favourite software.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

Better Czech manual and education materials – that’s what is most needed. I like documentation work, so I will be happy if I find more time to contribute to this topic.

Thanks to Petr for all his contributions – they are really appreciated! Czech users can explore the website and get involved with our community.

Today we’re talking to Emmanuel Semutenga, who helps young people in Uganda to develop key IT skills. Of course, LibreOffice plays a role in this…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m currently a back-end web developer by profession. I’m also a Project Manager for the project entitled “ICT for youth employability” at Kampabits, where my main work is on curriculum development. I live in Kampala, Uganda, Rubaga Division.

My hobbies and interests include blogging, cycling with Ultimate Cycling Uganda, dancing, making new friends, movies and hackathons.

What is Kampabits, and what does it do?

Uganda currently has the highest youth population between 17 to 24 years – that makes 80 percent of the population, and most of these young people lack the practical skills to enable them to get employed. Hence the intervention of Kampabits.

Kampabits is a youth-based organization founded in 2010 that uses ICT multimedia creatively to improve the lives of less privileged youth from the non-formal settlements. We also create safe spaces for persons with disabilities to freely express themselves while learning these in-demand skills.

We have helped 350 young people since our inception, with skills in computer literacy, graphic design and coding skills (front-end, back-end and full-stack developers) during our six month trainings. Kampabits later places these young people in a three month internship with their partner companies.

Kampabits also runs a “Women in Tech” project that trains 15 women in advanced coding skills, to make them employable, in a period of six months. This project focuses on women who have prior knowledge of computer basics. They are later placed in outsourcing jobs in companies like Tunga.

How does LibreOffice fit into your work?

During the whole scope of the training, especially our computer literacy sessions, presentations and curriculum development, we use LibreOffice (Writer, Impress and Calc) to train the young people in word processing, presentations and business book keeping.

This is done to remove costs the involved in acquiring proprietary software, and also show the them that free alternatives will deliver the same quality of work as proprietary software. We use Ubuntu, Lubuntu and Linux Mint as our main operating systems – and they always come with LibreOffice preinstalled.

Other free software we use includes: Gimp as an alternative for Photoshop, Inkscape in place of Illustrator, OBS Studio for recording screencasts, Visual Studio Code as our main code text editor, and Scratch to introduce youth to computer programming

We also use both the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 models to compliment our computer lab.

What advice would you have for other projects with similar goals?

Using free software alternatives can help to divert funds to the more pressing needs of organizations – like acquiring more computers to cater for more beneficiaries. So I would advice other organizations to try them out in phases, until they feel comfortable enough to overhaul the whole structure.

A huge thanks to Emmanuel for his work, and it’s great to see free and open source software making a big change all across the planet. Everyone is welcome to join the LibreOffice project, regardless of their location or language, and help us to spread the word and break down digital divides!

Members of The Document Foundation – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of our community. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills to the LibreOffice and Document Liberation projects, whether on a voluntary or paid basis. Today we’re talking to Sanjog Sigdel, a new TDF Member from our Nepalese community…

To start off, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m currently a Graduate Student pursuing my MTech. in IT degree here in Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal. Besides that, I am also a part-time instructor in a private college near the University: NIST College Banepa.

I love knowing how new technologies work and also love exploring new places. Unitil now I have traveled almost 30 districts of Nepal via trekking, project monitoring and tours. I’ve been using Linux-based operating systems (mainly Ubuntu) since 2012. And I am also a FOSS activist/volunteer. I teach my students to use open source software and most of them are using Linux, LibreOffice, and Python programming in the Nano text editor 🙂

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

Language translation is something I believe helps a large number of people in using all kinds of software. It breaks the digital divide created by language differences. Since 2017, with the guidance from my mentor, Mr Saroj Dhakal, I I have been contributing to LibreOffice localisation (L10N). I am currently the Project Reviewer for the Nepali language translation in the LibreOffice project.

Since I am already part of The Document Foundation, being a member and presenting myself as a formal representative of TDF in open source communities in Nepal could help other open source volunteers to join the FOSS Movement. Also, I will be working as a resource person for Kathmandu University Computer Club, an undergraduate computer club in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, in case they want to conduct any FOSS Activities. There I can pitch ideas around translating LibreOffice and hacking on the source code.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I am planning to conduct a LibreOffice localization event for the Nepali Langauge on Software Freedom Day, working together with Kathmandu University’s Open Source Community. I will update other TDF members on the mailing list soon.

Cheers to Sanjog for his contributions! And to everyone reading this who’s involved in the LibreOffice community, check out this short video and consider becoming a TDF Member too…

Today we’re talking to DaeHyen Sung from our Korean community, about opportunities and challenges for advocating LibreOffice and free software on the Korean peninsular…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

So, my surname is Sung, first name is DaeHyun (Korean Hangul notation: 성대현, Korean Hanja notation: 成大鉉). I’m from the Korean peninsular’s south-east area, Gyeongsang Province (경상도/慶尙道) region, Korea. Now, I live in the south-east side of Seoul (서울).

I’m Korean. My mother tongue is Gyeongsang dialect of Korean. But I can speaks Both Standard Korean [표준말 or 표준한국어/標準韓國語] and Gyeongsang dialect of Korean [경상도사투리 or 경상방언/慶尙方言].

My Twitter ID is @studioego, and I’m also on Github: https://github.com/studioego

I contribute to improvements to Korean language support in free/libre open source software (FLOSS), mostly in my spare time. Also, I’m learning East Asian Languages (such as Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese).

This is because, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) use Chinese characters 漢字 (also called “ideographs”) and share a similar culture. I am curious as I study the commonalities and differences in the East Asian languages. I also like to visit some historic sites and take pictures in Korea.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

My LibreOffice activities are about improving Korean features, bug reporting (Quality Assurance), translating into Korean, and some other things. Two years ago, I found a bug in LibreOffice’s Korean Hangul/Hanja dictionary. Some Korean Hangul/Hanja dictionary contents are broken on LibreOffice – so I fixed and added content. In addition, I updated the Hangul/Hanja conversion dictionary on LibreOffice.

In Korea, many people have rarely used LibreOffice – so I found many bugs and missing feaatures. So my overall goal is fix and improve Korean languages in LibreOffice.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on in the future?

Along with improving Korean support in LibreOffice, I’d like to do it with other FLOSS projects.

The Korean language (Hangul[한글]: 한국말/한국어 (these words are used in South Korea 🇰🇷), 조선말/조선어 (these words are used in North Korea 🇰🇵), 우리말 (this word is used neutrally in both Koreans and bt Korean expats, it literally means “our language”); Hanja[한자/漢字]: 韓國말/朝鮮말/韓國語/朝鮮語) is an East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people.

It is the official and national language of both Koreas: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), with different standardized official forms used in each territory. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (연변 조선족 자치주/延邊朝鮮族自治州/延边朝鲜族自治州) and Changbai Korean Autonomous County (장백 조선족 자치현/長白朝鮮族自治縣/长白朝鲜族自治县) of the People’s Republic of China [中華人民共和國, Mainland China]. It is also used in Japan, Uzbekistan, Russia [it reads “Корё мар” in Russian], Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.

Also, the Korean language uses Chinese characters (漢字). It means “Sino-Korean vocabulary” or “한자어(漢字語/Hanja-eo)” in Korean. It is similar to Japanese Kanji [漢字かんじ]. So when you’re working on FLOSS, you have to consider both Chinese and Japanese as well as Korean and vice versa.

In future, If I have time, I want to do more research about the differences in Korean languages in South Korea 🇰🇷 and North Korea 🇰🇵.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the experience like?

In 2017, I visited Taiwan’s FLOSS Conference, COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) as the Korean FLOSS Contributor.

At that time, I had already contributed Linux character maps applications – both GNOME (gucharmap) and KDE (kcharselect). Then I attended COSCUP at National Taiwan University, in Taipei, Taiwan, and in 2017, I met TDF board members Italo Vignoli and Taiwan’s TDF members, Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang. I also met a Japanese TDF member, Naruoka Ogasawara. When I watched Italo Vignoli’s presentation, it had a strong impression on me.

Then, Jeff Huang [Po-Yen Huang] invited me to the LibreOffice CJK Telegram group. So I joined the LibreOffice project in 2017. At that time, I installed and used LibreOffice for the first time. (When I was University student, I was used to OpenOffice. However, its compatibility was very low, so I had stop to using it.)

Last year, I met many of TDF members and Asian LibreOffice users in places such as Taiwan, Japan, Indonesian, Mainland China, etc. In February 2018, I met Japanese TDF member, Jun Nogata with KDE board member “Eike Hein”, KDE Korea members in Seoul. At that time, really I felt Jun Nogata’s passions for FLOSS.

Then, In August 2018, I heard and watched KDE Akademy 2018’s keynote. The keynote’s main topics were North Korea, FOSS in Both Koreas (North and South). In his keynote slide, he talked about Korean Expat challenges in Korea for using FOSS (for example, Korean input, fonts, banking, online transactions [maybe, Microsoft ActiveX technology is popular in Korea], and HWP [Hangul Word processor] files).

I think, In Korea, Microsoft’s product-friendly computing environment and proprietary software is popular (such as HWP), so many Koreans and expats in Korea think ALL FOSS is difficult to use. (Also, I personally feel that it is difficult to use FLOSS in Korea.)

In the presentation, I saw North Korea’s Linux distribution, Red Star OS (it’s based on KDE). Also, when I installed Red Star OS, I checked the office suite and found that it’s based on OpenOffice. In my opinion, Because of North Korea’s economic senctions, North Korean people mainly use FLOSS. I found the bugs in Red Star’s office suite – so I thought, I would have to work hard on the LibreOffice project.

Also, when I attended COSCUP, GNOME.Asia and openSUSE Asia summit 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan, I met other TDF members from Asia (such as LibreOffice Taiwan Team, Japan Team, Indonesia Team, etc). Then I met LibreOffice Indonesia team members at LibreOffice Asia Meetup in A+A Space, Taipei. I was impressed by the enthusiasm of Indonesian open source users and contributors to open source.

Also, In December, 2018, I attended Japanese meetups: OSC 2018 Fukuoka and the 8th Kyushu LibreOffice study meetup [第8回九州LibreOffice勉強会]. I met three contributors from Africa who are currently living in Japan. First time, I’m curious about African Open Source Contributors. Also I felt even more passion for FLOSS.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice? What does it need most?

If LibreOffice does not have feature enhancements for Korean users, I think that using the ODF format and document liberation movements in Korea will be impossible. Also the future for LibreOffice is not good regarding the Korean language. In Korea, the HWP format is still widely used HWP – and the share of Microsoft doc formats is still low. HWP format is the de facto standard official document format for the public sector and schools in Korea.
OpenOffice and LibreOffice can only open HWP files only if they were created with Hangul ’97 – newer versions of HWP files cannot be opened with these applications.

Recently, the government of the Republic of Korea Government announced that they will “use ODF insteadd of the HWP format”. But it’s only a slogan – and they only use draft documents officially on web-based document management systems. When I read the article, ”Taiwanese government standardises on true ODF document format”, I really admired the Taiwanese FLOSS activists and contributors.

Thanks DaeHyun Sung! And to everyone reading this: you can also give our community a hand and help to spread the word about free software and open standards. See our “What Can I Do For LibreOffice” site to get started!

Today we’re talking to Jun Nogata from our Japanese community!

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

So, I live in Himeji, Japan where UNESCO World Heritage site Himeji Castle is. I work a part-time lecturer at a local university.

I am a big fan of free and open source software (FOSS). I started to use Linux from Slackware 95, and I’m using Debian Sid at the moment. I am active in the Debian community in Japan and I’m also an OpenStreetMap mapper.

I like listening to indie rock music, playing guitar and DJing sometimes. Also, I’m learning Korean – I want to talk to my friend DaeHyun Sung from the Korean LibreOffice community!

Oh, and I created the LibreOffice Impress templates “Midnight Blue” and “Alizarin” – thank you for using them. On social media, you can find me on Twitter and Facebook.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

I am working on the Japanese Ask LibreOffice website as answerer and moderator – and I’m also involved in marketing and public relations for the Japanese team.

Previously, there was no marketing from the Japanese team. December 2018, I started to post information about LibreOffice from the Japanese community Twitter accounts. There were reactions from the users, like: “I was worried that there was no information about LibreOffice, but now it’s getting better.”

I talked to the Japanese team about the necessity of creating a blog, to share and communicate information outside of social networking services. Naruhiko Ogasawara consulted with Italo Vignoli to create the blog for the Japanese team. I am happy to add information about LibreOffice in Japanese to the blog.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on in the future?

I would like to try to improve the Japanese settings. LibreOffice is known as “cost-free, but poor-quality office software” in Japan because LibreOffice’s settings are not appropriate for the language.

In Japanese, for example, you can set characters per line and lines per page to determine the page layout, but the page style text grid is not able to specify characters per line and lines per page due to improper implementation. (If you are interested, please set 37 characters x 30 lines, without changing the font and ruby size.) I will try to fix these settings and change the bad image.

How did you originally get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the experience like?

As a user, I was attending the “Kansai LibreOffice Group” (関西LibreOffice勉強会) hosted by Shinji Enoki. My templates were included in LibreOffice 4.4 – it was a big surprise, and a pleasure for me that I could contribute to LibreOffice without changing the source code. A big thanks to the whole community for LibreOffice!

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice? What does it need most?

Ideally? users in all languages can use LibreOffice without changing any settings. The paragraph style of Writer is “Align left”, but in Japanese, “Justified” is standard. Japanese users need to change the settings before writing documents. That is very difficult.

However, if set the default setting to “Justified”, Americans and people who speak European languages will be in trouble. So I think that LibreOffice can create a mechanism to resolve conflicting settings in different languages.

Thanks Jun! Japanese LibreOffice users are welcome to join us and get involved in the project – we look forward to meeting you! (Also check out the English page too.)