In May 2022, LibreOffice has received two Awards: SourceForge’s Open Source Project of the Month, and Software Informer’s Editor’s Pick.
This is a partial screenshot of the current SourceForge home page: https://sourceforge.net/ and this is SourceForge’s LibreOffice download page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/libreoffice/
This is Software Informer’s home page: https://software.informer.com/ and this is Software Informer’s LibreOffice download page: https://libreoffice.informer.com/
After two years of pandemic restrictions, more and more in-person events are now taking place. Members of the LibreOffice community attended the recent Univention Summit 2022 in Bremen, northern Germany. They had a stand with LibreOffice merchandise, talked to visitors and answered questions.
Thorsten Behrens, Chairperson of The Document Foundation’s (TDF) Board of Directors, said: “The event was super, and it was great to talk to people in-person again.”
Lothar Becker, who served on the Board from 2020 to 2022, added:
The representation of TDF and the LibreOffice project at the event, along with partners, was very well received – and perceived as important in terms of digital sovereignty, both for users and other projects and providers. Intensive discussions for the first time – also in person again – especially regarding integration topics, and the role of TDF, were very encouraging and motivating for all after the long period of the pandemic. The evening then offered the opportunity to continue these discussions in a more informal atmosphere.
Let’s wrap up with a couple more pictures from the event. We plan to attend many more this year – keep an eye on this blog for updates!
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Joining a large and established project like LibreOffice can be daunting for many. The software has a large codebase, and sub-projects use a wide array of tools. In recent years, we’ve made efforts to simplify the onboarding process by linking more services together with SSO (single sign-on), thereby reducing some of the complexity. In addition, we’ve created Easy Hacks and similar “bite size” projects in other areas, so that newcomers can get involved quickly and achieve something without months of work.
Currently, we have two websites/pages that function as starting points for new contributors: What Can I Do For LibreOffice and the Get Involved page. The former was set up by LibreOffice’s Albanian community, and lets users click through topics of interest, until they find something they want to do. The latter is a regular page, with a list of sub-projects inside LibreOffice, and quick steps to make initial contact.
Throughout 2021, we posted regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog. In many cases, we emphasised how these contributors started off as regular LibreOffice users, but wanted to “scratch an itch” and start to make changes to the software. We highlighted the ways in which other community members helped newcomers to start working on projects, and used these as “success stories” on our social media accounts, encouraging others to make the step-up from being a user to an active contributor.
In addition, we have accounts and projects listed on various volunteering platforms, including VolunteerMatch and Idealist (English), Vostel (German), Vapaaehtoistyo (Finnish), TuDu (Polish) and HeroClan, Um sem um tam and Zapojim se (Czech).
In early 2021, we announced LibreOffice New Generation, a project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While The Document Foundation is proud that our community is diverse and has people from all ages, younger people help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to the project. So we wanted to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.
To achieve this, we set up the New Generation project with communication channels, contact points in the community, and initial ideas for things to work on. The community grew quickly, with 300 members arriving in the Telegram group within the space of a few weeks, and many ideas being proposed. One was to create a distinctive flyer that can be distributed in schools and universities, which not only explains what LibreOffice does, but how all users can also get involved and help to improve the software. New Generation community members created an initial design for the flyer, along with an update, and then translated it into several languages. TDF used funds from its marketing budget to get flyers printed and distributed to people around the globe.
We also continued to issue Open Badges, special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming contributions from people in the community. For instance, we sent our personalised badges to French translators of the Math Guide, along with Brazilian Portuguese documentation team members and Czech documentation contributors.
Rania Amina from the Indonesian LibreOffice community writes:
On Wednesday, 18 May 2022, I had the opportunity to talk in one of the sessions at the Virtual Visit of SMK Amaliah 1 Ciawi Bogor. This activity is a routine agenda for Amaliah Vocational School in the form of seminars and visits to institutions or communities to broaden students’ knowledge of Information and Communication Technology to Support Creative and Innovative Education.
I represent the Indonesian LibreOffice community, given the opportunity to provide material for the activities. The topic that I conveyed revolves around LibreOffice and FOSS in general, and how the open source community ecosystem can be well developed so that it can be a space for self-development before pursuing a career in that field.
This event was held virtually, starting at 08:00 WIB (Western Indonesian Time/GMT+7) until 12:00 WIB, with around 90 participants. The enthusiasm of the participants in this activity was quite high, considering that apparently both LibreOffice and FOSS were new things for the students. On this occasion, I also conveyed to them to never hesitate to start contributing, both in the coding and non-coding spheres, for example as testers, bug hunters, making designs for promotions in their environment, creating events related to LibreOffice, and more.
We hope that – after this activity – LibreOffice ID will collaborate again with Amaliah Vocational School to organize offline activities in the future.
Many thanks to Rania and the community for their great work! Learn more here.
Berlin, May 12, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.2.7 Community, the seventh minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family, targeted at desktop productivity, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
LibreOffice 7.2.7’s changelog pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.7/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.7/RC2 (changed in RC2).
LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.
LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
LibreOffice 7.2.7 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.
Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:
The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 7.3. As usual it was team work, namely: translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Ludmila Chládková; localized pictures by Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Thanks to all the team for their work! The Czech translation of the guide 7.3 is available for download on this page.
Indeed, many thanks to everyone in the Czech community for their work! Learn more about LibreOffice’s documentation project here.
