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Announcing LibreOffice New Generation

Today we’re announcing a new project: LibreOffice New Generation. This isn’t about the software, but about the people behind it. As you probably know, LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of certified developers and volunteers, working on the source code, translations, documentation, design, QA, marketing, infrastructure and other areas.

Well, we want to reach out to even more people, so read on to find out more…

What is this?

LibreOffice New Generation is our project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While we’re 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 want to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.

Who can join?

Anyone! If you’re a school or university student and use LibreOffice, we’d love to hear from you. What do you use LibreOffice for? How can it be improved? Can we help you to spread the word? Join us and let’s work together to make LibreOffice even better!

But everyone else is welcome to join too. The Document Foundation is a small non-profit, so we’d appreciate all help with bringing younger contributors into the project and helping them to get involved with our teams.

What will you do?

Many students who contribute to free and open source software projects like to have something which confirms their work. At TDF we’ve been issuing Open Badges for community contributions – these are special badges with metadata inside, showing what someone did. So we’d like to start issuing these to younger and newer community members too.

We have other ideas and projects, but we’d like to hear from you about your experiences! What else can we offer? How can we credit and reward contributors for their work? Let us know what you think…

How can I join?

If you’d like to discuss ways to get more younger people involved in the LibreOffice community, join our Telegram group where we can discuss Open Badges and other ideas for LibreOffice New Generation. (For all other discussions and suggestions for LibreOffice, please see the general group.) If you’d like to suggest something directly, email me (Mike) and we’ll have a chat.

We look forward to meeting you, and hearing your ideas and experiences!

Community Member Monday: Felipe Viggiano and Zhenghua Fong

Today we’re talking to two people who’ve recently decided to become members of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. First up, Felipe Viggiano…

Hey Felipe, tell us a bit about yourself!

Hello there! I’m writing from the state of São Paulo, in Brazil. I’m an electrical engineer and have been working with LibreOffice for several years. Despite all this time, I started to contribute only a few months ago.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I’m working with the Documentation Team, mainly on the update of the Calc Guide with the new features in LibreOffice 7.0. Working with the team has been a huge learning opportunity, and the other team members are always there for a little help when needed.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

The reason I applied for membership is to try to contribute a little more to the project in other areas.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In the future, I would like to start contributing more with others teams, and with TDF in order to help increase LibreOffice’s success. In my opinion, LibreOffice needs to be better known – we have a great free office solution that attends the majority of the requirements of the general public, but, at least in Brazil, many people are not aware of this!

Next us is Zhenghua Fong, who works on improving LibreOffice’s compatibility with other office suites…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m part of a team of three people from Fuzhou, a coastal city known for its hot springs, in the Fujian province in China. When we are not coding, we like jogging in the nearby park. Every year we have company-wide Half Marathon Run around the main campus. Around 7,000 employees compete in the run and other sporting events.

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

As we’re an education tech company, documents are at the core of our business. LibreOffice works great for us. Recently, we have add a whiteboard feature to our product with the help of LibreOffice Online.

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

Compatibility is the area we are working on. Because large parts of the population still use Microsoft Office-based document formats, it’s important to our users that they are able to open documents and get them right the first time.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice
really need?

Performance. We find the performance of our product has room for improvement, especially when compared against Microsoft Office and WPS from Kingsoft.

Thanks to Felipe and Fong for all their contributions! Our worldwide community is what makes LibreOffice strong – everyone is welcome to join and find out what they can do for LibreOffice!

Czech translation of LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

It’s a bit late for the Christmas gift , but we finished translation of the Calc guide 6.4. As usual it was team work, namely:

Translations: Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Zuzana Pitříková

Text corrections: Marcela Tomešová and Vendula Crhonková

Localised pictures: Roman Toman

Technical support: Miloš Šrámek.

Thanks to all the team, and especially Petr for his amazing amount of translation work, Marcela for her patience with our mistakes, and Roman for his continuous support. The Czech translation of the Calc guide 6.4 is available for download here.

Zdeněk adds that the Czech team is continuing with the translation of the Writer Guide, and is always looking for new translators. Join them, or indeed teams in other languages!

Best Community 2020: LibreOffice at DINAcon

At the recent online DINAcon (Digital Sustainability Conference) in Switzerland, Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation gave a talk about how TDF and the LibreOffice community works.

And guess what: our community won an award at DINAcon too: Best Community 2020! We’re really proud to have such an active, passionate and diverse range of contributors all across the globe – LibreOffice wouldn’t be as popular and powerful today without their help.

So to DINAcon: thank you very much for the award and trophy, which we accept on behalf of the whole LibreOffice community! And to everyone out there working on the many different sub-projects in LibreOffice: thank you so much for everything you do. And hopefully see you some point next year!

Community Member Monday: Sarper Akdemir

Today we’re talking to Sarper Akdemir, who is a passionate supporter of free software and is helping to add new features to LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Istanbul, where I am pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. I like to hack code, cook, play bass, and rice some desktops in my free time. My primary computer is a Thinkpad X220 – such a cutie – and I use Emacs to hack on it.

On April 28 2018, Istanbul Technical University Software Freedom Club (ITUGnu) organized an event called “Free Software Summit”, which introduced me to free software. After that event, I decided to join and be an active member of the club, in the hope of learning more about free software and the hacker culture.

People in ITUGnu informed me about a summer camp called “Mustafa Akgül Free Software Camp”, which is a non-profit organization where people all around Turkey volunteer to teach attendees about free software, with courses ranging from GNU/Linux system administration to IT law.

I took a workshop there that Muhammet Kara gave called “LibreOffice Development Workshop” which got me started hacking on LibreOffice.

After the workshop, I decided to keep contributing to LibreOffice and apply to the Google Summer of Code. And I was lucky enough to get selected as a Google Summer of Code student in the past summer.

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

Throughout the Google Summer of Code period, hacking on LibreOffice daily was a lot of fun and at times challenging. While doing so, I got to interact and learn from the community of developers, especially my mentor Thorsten Behrens (CIB). Since being in the LibreOffice community is so rewarding, I wanted it to be official with a TDF membership – and having a say in what the future holds for LibreOffice is, of course, a plus.

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

I finished my Google Summer of Code project that introduced physics-based animation effects to LibreOffice Impress. And right now, I’m looking forward to fixing some bugs, starting from the ones related to animation effects.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

Since LibreOffice is one of the core utility pieces that the end user looks for in a computer, I think it is also an important piece for end users to achieve freedom. Therefore, I think LibreOffice can always use more robustness, so I will be fixing as many bugs as I can in the future.

Other than that, in the near future I’m trying to organize an event under ITUGnu to help some fellow students to contributing to LibreOffice and other free software projects.

Huge thanks to Sarper for his work on the new Impress animations, and Thorsten, his mentor, for supporting him. We hope to be in the next Google Summer of Code, but in the meantime, everyone with some C++ knowledge is welcome to explore the LibreOffice source code and try some EasyHacks. We’ll be there if you need help!

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