Having fun together: The Nepalese LibreOffice Community

Who makes LibreOffice? And who can get involved to make it even better? The answer is – everyone! For instance, the Nepalese LibreOffice community spent much of April 2018 localising the software, and at the end of the month, they had a fun meetup:

Saroj Dhakal summarised what they did:

  • The FOSS Nepal Community and Kathmandu University Open Source Club participated in and co-organised the event
  • For translations of LibreOffice, participants reduced the number of critical error strings from over 9000 down to 3808
  • LibreOffice Online was completely localised during this event
  • The number of active contributors increased from 2 to 35

At the end of the event, participants received a certificate, thanking them for their help:

So, great work by the Nepalese community! One of the main goals of LibreOffice is to make the software available in as many languages as possible, bridging digital divides across the globe. So all help from translators and localisers is really appreciated.

And as you can see, joining an open source community like LibreOffice is a great way to meet new people and have fun! There are many things you can help out with, from translations and marketing through to design and documentation: see here for more.

The May 2018 Month of LibreOffice begins!

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LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world. And throughout May, we want to say a big thank you to everyone involved! Now is a great time to get involved with our friendly community and help out in many areas, from translations and documentation through to user support and marketing.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be keeping track of contributions to the project, and add your name to this wiki page if you help out. The page will be updated daily, and everyone listed there can claim a sticker, as shown in the video above! Here’s how you can get involved…

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

  • Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.4.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

So there’s plenty to do! Dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Twitter account over the next four weeks!

LibreOffice monthly recap: April 2018

Lots of things are happening in the LibreOffice community – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in April…

  • LibreOffice 6.0.3 was released on April 3. It includes over 70 bug and regression fixes – see the release announcement for more details.
  • From April 6 – 8, we had a LibreOffice community meeting and Hackfest in Hamburg. There were around 45 participants, who split into two groups. One group focused on a hackfest – a joint coding session. At the same time, a meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community took place. See here for the results of the hackfest, and what we discussed.

  • We talked to Edmund Laugasson from the Estonian LibreOffice community about his efforts to promote free and open source software in his country. “ODF is quite widely used in Estonia – for instance, educational institutions usually have LibreOffice installed, along with some local authorities.”Full interview here.
  • Preparation began for the Month of LibreOffice, May 2018 – crediting contributions all across the project. If you’re a proud user of LibreOffice and would like to join our community, get involved! (We’ll even send you a cool sticker pack.)

  • The next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 26 – 28 in Tirana, Albania, and TDF put out a call for papers. All members and contributors are invited to submit talks, lectures and workshops for the conference – see here for more info.

  • Finally, we gave a warm welcome to our new Google Summer of Code 2018 students. We have a record off 11 students this year, and they will help to improve LibreOffice in many areas: the LOEclipse Plugin, Notebookbar, LibreOffice Viewer for Android and more. So a big hello to Daniel Silva, Ekansh Jha, Hrishabh Rajput, Kshitij Pathania, Manuj Vashist, Muammer Mert Tümer, Nickson Thanda, Raghav Lalvani, Saurav Chirania, Shobhan Mandal and Vikas Mahato!

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and get involved!

Welcome, Google Summer of Code ’18 students!

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. The Document Foundation and LibreOffice participate every year, and today we are happy to announce a new record of 11 accepted students!

Projects are widespread and include Python support in the LOEclipse Plugin, domain specific language in UI testing, several improvements to the LibreOffice Viewer for Android, better usability for the Notebookbar, and fixing some of the most-annoying issues in the “100 paper cuts” project. Students will introduce an interface for external data source import into Calc, revamp the print dialog, and provide SmartArt editing capabilities in Impress.

Now the community bonding period starts, which intends to get students ready to start contributing on May 14th. So welcome Daniel Silva, Ekansh Jha, Hrishabh Rajput, Kshitij Pathania, Manuj Vashist, Muammer Mert Tümer, Nickson Thanda, Raghav Lalvani, Saurav Chirania, Shobhan Mandal and Vikas Mahato. We hope you will have as much fun with LibreOffice as Jaskaran Singh did in 2016:

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LibreOffice @ 17th Linux-Infotag in Augsburg, Germany

LibreOffice is the default office suite in almost every desktop Linux distribution, and the Linux community has done a lot to help support, develop and promote LibreOffice over the years. So we like to meet up with Linux users and free software enthusiasts face-to-face – and on April 21 we were at the 17. Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany.

This yearly event has been running since 2001, and is described as being “one of the oldest and biggest Linux-related events in the area”, with around 350 visitors. Christian Lohmeier and Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community set up a booth which had a screen showing a video of LibreOffice 6.0, along with stickers and (most importantly) flyers encouraging people to get involved with the project:

Virtually every Linux user has heard of LibreOffice, so we didn’t have to explain what the software does. But we talked about what the community is doing, some things we’re working on, and how people can help. One especially hot topic was LibreOffice Online – so we demonstrated the latest version, showing its collaborative editing features.

Many other Linux and free software-related communities were present, and there were talks on security, programming, networks and containers (eg Docker). In the afternoon, Mike gave a talk in German called “LibreOffice: where we’re from, where we’re going, and how to get involved”. On the whole, it was great to meet so many passionate FOSS fans, and we look forward to going again next year. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hello!

Coming up on April 27: First Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1

LibreOffice 6.1 is due to be released in mid August 2018, with many new features (those already implemented are summarized on the release notes page, with much more still to come).

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the Quality Assurance (QA) community is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1 on Friday, April 27, 2018. All details are available on the specific wiki page.

In order to find, report and triage bugs, the tests during the First Bug Hunting Session will be performed on the first Alpha version of LibreOffice 6.1, which will be available on the pre-releases server on the day of the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be run in parallel with the production version – so you can test without affecting your existing stable installation.

Mentors will be available on April 27th 2018, from 8AM UTC to 8PM UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel: #libreoffice-qa (connect via webchat) and its Telegram bridge. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 6.1.0 Alpha1) will be available until the end of May.

During the day there will be two dedicated sessions focus on two of the tenders implemented in LibreOffice 6.1: The first to test the improvements on the image handling between 10AM UTC and 12AM UTC, and the second to test the HSQLDB import filter for firebird between 14PM UTC and 16PM UTC.

And the Month of LibreOffice is starting!

Throughout May we will be running the Month of LibreOffice, awarding cool stickers to contributors across the project. The Bug Hunting Session is your chance to get involved with the LibreOffice QA project, and grab a sticker during May – so get involved and help us make LibreOffice 6.1 the best release yet! See here for all the details.