Category: Interviews

LibreOffice contributors around the world have a big impact on the success of the project – we really appreciate their help. Today we’re talking to Chandrakant Dhutadmal, who is involved in various free and open source projects including Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice…

Where do you live?

I live in Pune, Maharashtra State, India.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work for the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which is an autonomous scientific organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, in the government of India. We worked on a project of national importance where we aimed to provide software tools in Indian languages (free of charge) so that people can easily use the software in their own languages.

One of the applications which we worked on initially (way back in 2006) was OpenOffice.org. Later we shifted to work on LibreOffice. I do contribute to the project in my free time as well.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

During the above mentioned project work, we interacted with many organizations and individuals. Mr. Rajesh Ranjan was one of the persons who I interacted with – and told to about how the open source community works, and what kind of impact can it bring to the overall project.

We interacted very frequently and that is where we started working on organized efforts of volunteers for LibreOffice in India. I started doing a bit of contributions for LibreOffice since that time. Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni, who heads the department where I work, and my office in general have been really supportive for such activities.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I normally work on LibreOffice marketing, community building and localization. These tasks keep me occupied enough.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

I was very pleased with the way the global LibreOffice community accepts newcomers and beginners. Initially, I was hardly a serious contributor to LibreOffice. But the fact that even small contributions by new contributors are valued by the community. Members like Sophie Gautier and Italo Vignoli have always been very supportive to me and others in India.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

One of the most common and frequent issues which people report to me whenever I talk about LibreOffice is compatibility with Microsoft Office. It is quite a difficult task to satisfy them by explaining a few facts. I generally ask people to pinpoint the issues which affect them. Another area is to build a community of developers in India who can contribute to LibreOffice development.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I read lot of articles on financial literacy. This is one of the topics which interests me a lot. I also like to travel to different places.

Anything else you want to mention?

I hope people get motivated enough by reading interviews like this, and get involved in the project!

Thanks Chandrakant – and indeed, there are many ways to get involved and make LibreOffice better for millions of users around the world. Our community is friendly and fun, and contributing to the QA, documentation, design, marketing or other projects is a great way to build up experience for a future career!

The Document Foundation’s wiki has lots of resources and materials for marketing LibreOffice in English – such as presentations, flyers, stickers and branding guidelines. But we also want to spread the word about free software and open standards in every country, so we really appreciate our international community which promotes LibreOffice in other languages. One such community member is Nguyễn Vũ Hưng who helps with marketing LibreOffice.

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I live in Hanoi, Vietnam, and you can find me on social media at:

• My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/nguyenvuhung
• LibreOffice fan-page: https://www.facebook.com/libreoffice.org/
• LibreOffice users’ group: https://goo.gl/ou2RGF
• Vietnam LibreOffice users’ group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/libovn/

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I work as an CTO for a game and offshore development company based in Hanoi. The company has nothing related to LibreOffice, but our staff uses LibreOffice at work. I’m a volunteer in the LibreOffice community in my spare time, and have been a long-time contributor to open source projects.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

​It goes back about ten years ago, when I contributed to Vietnamese localization and ​community support with OpenOffice.org. When LibreOffice started, I join the new project with nearly the same role, translating the user interface, until recently. The English skills of average users around the world are getting better, which is why I’ve changed my focus to open source and LibreOffice marketing.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

For a year or two until now, I’ve found that the role most fitting for me is forum and Facebook fan-page content seeding. It works 🙂 For that kind of marketing and content seeding activity, getting people involved is the most difficult part. I’ve been looking at what Slashdot does, and I’m learning about approaches to improve KPIs (key performance indicators) such as the statistics for “seen”, “comments” and “engagement” in Facebook posts.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

This is not my first experience with LibreOffice, but I still remember: I was mentoring a student who was finishing an Easy Hack. It was not really “easy” to read so much code and start hacking away on a small improvement – but luckily, he did it 🙂 (Here’s the Bugzilla ticket showing how it went.)

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

It needs to go mobile (more work on Android) and get into the cloud (more work on LibreOffice Online).

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Playing with my kids takes up most of my time. I balance time spent with my family with other IT/open source activities, including LibreOffice, Agile Vietnam ​and ITEC (IT Experts Clubs in Vietnam). We hold monthly events about Agile/Scrum and an event series named “S* Architecture”. I wish I could do the same with LibreOffice in Vietnam!

Thanks Nguyễn for all your contributions. And for others reading this who’d like to help out with LibreOffice marketing – or indeed translations, design, documentation, QA and other projects – join us and get involved!

Having concluded our video interviews from FOSDEM, we now return to our regular LibreOffice contributor interviews on the blog. Today we talk to Daniel A. Rodriguez, an Argentinian LibreOffice and Free Software supporter, who helps with marketing, translations and design.

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I live in Posadas, the capital of Misiones in the north-east of Argentina. Here’s my Google+ profile.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I use my spare time to contribute.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

When the LibreOffice project started (as a continuation of OpenOffice.org) I was still quite a new GNU/Linux user, but wanted to return something to the global community which had helped me many times before. So, I subscribed to mailing lists and – I don’t remember exactly how – in January 2011 I started to translate the LibreOffice website into Spanish.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I try to stay tuned to marketing, translating press releases, design blog posts and developer blog posts. I maintain several social media profiles as “Comunidad LibreOffice Argentina”:

• Google+ – LibreOffice.ar
• Google+ – Daniel A. Rodriguez
• Twitter
• Telegram
• Facebook

All of these can, I think, help to attract volunteers to the project. But we must recognize that the Spanish community is fragmented into several geographical regions. And that’s why at the end of 2016, with help from two
other community member (Adolfo Jaime Barrientos and Carlos Parra Saldivar), we started a new blog at The Document Foundation. Now it has another well known LibreOffice user and advocate: Ricardo Berlasso. The goal is to get more people participating, now and then.

Sometimes I work on ideas that others can bring into reality – such as the airport advertisement for the launch of LibreOffice 4.0, or more recently the MUFFIN illustration for the blog post in December.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice?

Being able to participate actively in an international community, with the push and motivation that revolves around LibreOffice and Free Software, was – and still is – indescribable.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

I think that an option for automatic updates, like Firefox has for example, would be great.

Finally, what do you do when you’re not contributing to LibreOffice?

I work the whole day in a secondary school with a technical orientation. My obligations are to maintain the infrastructure on which different systems work: institutional management, Virtual Education Environment, proxy cache, DNS, among others.

Thanks Daniel! And thanks to everyone else involved in marketing and localisation of LibreOffice. If you’re reading this and want to join the friendly, worldwide LibreOffice community, get involved!