Category: Marketing

In 2023, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2023 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Slide Decks and Videos for Marketing Purposes

We updated presentations on The Document Foundation (project history and digital sovereignty), LibreOffice (technology, including commentary, and sustainability) and Open Document Format (standard format, ODF and interoperability, and OOXML issues) for use by community members. Videos are also available to help tailor a presentation to the audience.

We updated the LibreOffice Technology White Paper, which explains the evolution of LibreOffice from a single desktop product to a product-based technology for personal or enterprise productivity that is the foundation for a series of products optimised for different platforms, such as desktop, mobile and cloud. To emphasise the importance of the LibreOffice technology concept, a specific logo has been created to make it visually easier to associate all products based on this technology platform.

We also created a Security Backgrounder that describes – in a language accessible to everyone, even non-security specialists – the impressive work done by the developers and quality control specialists in the security area of LibreOffice.

Finally, the project continues to invest in communicating the sustainability of FOSS. Companies need to consider that focusing on the ‘free as beer’ nature of software can seriously damage the projects they rely on as strategic assets of their infrastructure. It is a short-sighted decision because they can save a lot by not paying a single penny, but they may also have to spend a lot tomorrow if the original project is unable to sustain itself by having to revert to a proprietary solution.

The Importance of Donations

Donations are essential for the current operations and future development of The Document Foundation, as they allow us to keep the organisation alive, fund specific activities, support events and other marketing tasks organised by the native language projects, and maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice.

In 2023, donations were used to fund various activities: the organisation of the LibreOffice conference in Bucharest and the regional LibreOffice conferences in Asia and Latin America, events and other activities of the native language communities, reimbursement of travel expenses to conferences around the world, the supply of merchandise for the Month of LibreOffice, and other small projects.

Ongoing Marketing Activities

Marketing for The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is a large team effort, with contractors paid for their work – thanks to the funds provided by our generous donors – and several volunteers who run activities on both a global and local level to increase visibility and brand awareness.

One of the ongoing projects is the Community Member Monday series, where one or more community members are interviewed about their contribution to the project.

The marketing team, supported by many volunteers, created a series of New Features videos for the announcement of LibreOffice 7.6 and LibreOffice 24.2, covering the suite as a whole – and Writer, Calc and Impress in detail. These videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users and are often embedded in news sites. They were also translated into several languages by volunteers from the localisation community.

Activities Month-by-Month

JANUARY

In January we had two update releases for LibreOffice: 7.4.4 and 7.4.5. The Documentation team announced the availability of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4, an update to the 7.3 guide, and the Czech community announced their translation of the Calc Guide 7.4.

Later in the month, The Document Foundation commented on the EU’s proposed Cyber Resilience Act, as the text in its original form could have devastating (though probably unintended) consequences for several European-based open source projects, such as most of the products based on LibreOffice Technology.

We also welcomed Juan José González, a new member of the team, in the role of Web Technology Engineer, in charge of the TDF and LibreOffice web properties: the websites, the blogs, the wiki, Weblate and much more.

FEBRUARY

The main focus was the announcement of LibreOffice 7.5, with a host of new and improved features, and participation in FOSDEM 2023 with a booth and a half-day devroom.

The documentation team proudly announced the availability of the Writer and Calc guides for LibreOffice 7.5, reducing the gap between the release of the software and the guide to just a few days.

LibreOffice had a booth at the Uninvention Summit 2023 in Bremen, Germany.

We launched The Document Foundation’s Mastodon account to increase our social media presence.

MARCH

We started the month by announcing the LibreOffice 2023 conference in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, from Wednesday 20 September (community meetings) to Saturday 23 September.

During the month we had three updates of LibreOffice: 7.5.1 on 2 March, 7.4.6 on 9 March and 7.5.2 on 30 March. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) also announced the internal use of products based on LibreOffice technology, which shows how much we care about data protection and privacy.

Members of the German-speaking LibreOffice community met at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, where they had a booth with merchandise, and then at the LinuxHotel in Essen. The Czech localisation team released the LibreOffice 7.3 Base Guide in Czech.

APRIL

We reported on our policy-related activities in the European Union, where the TDF has supported several campaigns in support of FOSS in the EU and helped raise awareness of the problems with the Cyber Resilience Act.

Speaking of FOSS, we looked at how it continues to grow, according to data provided by analyst reports and user statements. In 2022 over 76% of IT managers have increased their use of FOSS, while almost 22% have stayed the same and less than 2% have reduced it.

Throughout the month, we began posting sections of The Document Foundation’s 2022 Annual Report. The Brazilian community presented the LibreOffice project at FLISOL (Festival Latino Americano de Instalação de Software Livre) in Brasilia.

MAY

May is the Month of LibreOffice. This is a campaign we run twice a year to encourage users to join our community and help improve the software. People who contribute get some goodies in return. The LibreOffice YouTube channel passed the 3 million views mark.

We announced LibreOffice 7.5.3 and LibreOffice 7.4.7, the final release of the 7.4 family, and the various sponsorship packages for the LibreOffice 2024 conference in Bucharest. The LibreOffice Google Summer of Code projects for 2023 were also selected.

In May, the esLibre conference was held in Zaragoza, Spain, and members of the Spanish-speaking community took the opportunity to meet in person and talk about the project. The Italian community attended the Merge IT event in Verona.

JUNE

We announced the LibreOffice Conf Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023 in Indonesia, an event that will bring together Linux and FOSS activists, contributors, users, communities and companies in the Asian region. It will be held in Surakarta in October 2023.

We also announced a Getting Started with Development workshop at the LibreOffice Conference 2023, aimed at students from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest.

We released LibreOffice 7.5.4 Community, the fourth minor update of the 7.5 family, and published some ideas from community members about the integration of LibreOffice and the Thunderbird email client.

JULY

We welcomed Michael Weghorn to the Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice. Michael is a developer focusing on accessibility improvements. The TDF team met in Munich to discuss the project, community development and software development.

The Extensions and Templates website received a number of improvements thanks to the recently hired web developer: Juan José González (aka “JJ”).

The Membership Committee (MC), responsible for managing membership applications and renewals, announced a new membership management system called Proteus.

The Documentation and Localisation Communities updated the LibreOffice 7.5 Getting Started Guide and finished a Czech translation of the LibreOffice 7.4 Draw Guide.

We also released LibreOffice 7.5.5, the fifth maintenance release of LibreOffice 7.5.

AUGUST

The biggest news in August was the release of LibreOffice 7.6, with a host of new features and updates.

We announced the full version of TDF’s Annual Report 2022, and the LibreOffice documentation team released Impress Guide 7.5 and Draw Guide 7.5. We use Weblate to translate the LibreOffice user interface, and thanks to donations we were able to fund some improvements to Weblate to help all localisation volunteers.

We celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Debian project, which was officially founded by Ian Murdock on 16 August 1993. The Debian community has been one of the projects supporting LibreOffice from day one.

We also announced the fourth edition of the LibreOffice Latin America Conference, to be held at the UNAM Engineering Faculty in Mexico City in November.

SEPTEMBER

The biggest event in September was the LibreOffice 2023 conference in Bucharest, Romania. We had a great time with talks, workshops and social gatherings. Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students also presented some of the results of their work. Five projects were successfully completed.

We released LibreOffice 7.6.2 and 7.5.7, two major updates with security fixes. The documentation community released the LibreOffice Writer Guide 7.6, just one month after the announcement.

OCTOBER

During the month we edited and uploaded videos from the LibreOffice 2023 Conference in Bucharest, Romania.

The month was full of LibreOffice and FOSS events. We started with the LibreOffice Nepali Localisation Sprint 2023, followed by LibreOffice at the Software Freedom Law Centre in Delhi, India, and LibreOffice at LinuxDays 2023 in Prague.

The LibreOffice Conference Asia 2023 was a great success, with speakers and attendees from all over the world.

Finally, the QA community blogged about SVG support improvements and interoperability work with the Inkscape community.

NOVEMBER

November is also the month of LibreOffice. The project released LibreOffice 7.5.8, a maintenance release for the 7.5 branch with compatibility improvements and bug fixes, and LibreOffice 7.6.3, while the documentation community released the Impress and Draw guides for LibreOffice 7.6.

The LibreOffice Viewer app for Android was made available again in the Google Play Store, with experimental editing support.

We supported our friends at the Free Software Foundation Europe by signing the Open Letter “The right to install any software on any device” to the German Bundestag in support of sustainability and freedom in electronic products in the EU.

The LibreOffice Latin American Conference 2023, held in Mexico City, was a huge success with hundreds of attendees, including many students.

DECEMBER

We announced LibreOffice 7.6.4 and LibreOffice 7.5.9, and the documentation community announced the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.6, which reflects the changes and updates in the latest version of the suite.

Meanwhile, we prepared a Security Backgrounder document that describes – in language accessible to everyone, including non-security specialists – the impressive work done by developers and QA specialists in the area of LibreOffice security.

Finally, on the last day of the year, we thanked the entire LibreOffice community for all their support and contributions throughout 2023.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

In 2022, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

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LibreOffice Strategic Marketing Plan

We have invested in the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, with additional activities such as the release of generic presentations about The Document Foundation (History, and Digital Sovereignty), LibreOffice (Technology, also with comments, and Sustainability) and Open Document Format (Generic, ODF and Interoperability, and OOXML Issues), to be used by community members. Videos who help to personalize a slide deck according to the audience are also available.

We have also released a White Paper about LibreOffice Technology, to explain the evolution of LibreOffice from a single desktop product to a product based technology for individual or enterprise productivity, which is the foundation for a series of products optimized for different platforms, such as desktop, mobile and the cloud. To underline the importance of the LibreOffice Technology concept, a specific logo has been created, to make visually easier to associate all products based on this technology platform.

A second logo about the LibreOffice Ecosystem was also developed, to make it easier to recognize companies who provide development, support, migration or training services around a product based on the LibreOffice Technology. This logo has not yet been adopted on a large scale, and because of this there will be some specific actions in 2023 to encourage companies which belong to the ecosystem to use it.

The project will also continue to invest in the communication of FOSS sustainability, as enterprises should consider that focusing on the “free as in beer” nature of the software can seriously harm projects that they rely on as strategic assets of their infrastructure. It is a short-sighted decision, as they can save a lot by not paying a single dime, but they may also have to spend quite a lot tomorrow if the original project is not able to self sustain, as they will have to switch back to a proprietary solution.

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The Importance of Donations

Donations are vital for current operations and future developments of The Document Foundation, as they allow us to keep the organization alive, to fund specific activities, to support events and other marketing tasks organized by native language projects, and to maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice.

In addition, funds from donations were used to for several development related tasks.

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Ongoing Marketing Activities

Marketing at The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is a large team effort, with contractors paid for their activity – thanks to the money made available by our generous donors – and several volunteers carrying out actions both at global and local levels to increase visibility and brand awareness.

One of the ongoing projects is the Community Member Monday Series, with interviews of one or more community members about their contributions to the project.

The marketing team, supported by many volunteers, created a series of New Features videos for the announcement of LibreOffice 7.4 and LibreOffice 7.5, covering the suite as a whole – and Writer, Calc and Impress in detail. These videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users and are often embedded into news websites. They have also been translated into different languages by volunteers of the localization community.

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Activities Month by Month

In early January, we announced LibreOffice 7.2.5 Community, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family, with 90 bug and regression fixes and many improvements to document compatibility. Also, we announced Klingon and Interslavic support for the upcoming LibreOffice 7.3 release.

In mid January, Linux New Media released a special edition magazine, full of tutorials, tips and tricks about LibreOffice. Some of the articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community. The magazines come with DVDs with LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, plus extra templates, extensions and guidebooks, and we had some copies to give away to schools and communities.

In late January, the Matrix bridge for the LibreOffice IRC Channels was launched, to allow the use of a modern chat tool to participate more efficiently in LibreOffice-related discussions. At the same time, the European Commission OSPO (Open Source Program Office) announced a bug bounty program to help selected projects – such as LibreOffice – find (and potentially fix) security issues. Rewards were from € 250 up to € 5,000 for security bug disclosures, with 20% added on top if the researcher was also able to provide a fix for the bug.

In early February, the announcement of LibreOffice 7.3 Community represented another giant step in the direction of interoperability with Microsoft Office’s proprietary files, as the release provided a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites.
After the announcement, the project was at the virtual FOSDEM with a devroom and a booth. During the two busy days we had the opportunity to meet LibreOffice advocates and answer their questions after presentations or in chat rooms.

On February 17, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of The Document Foundation, and the new Board of Directors started the two year term. Members are: Thorsten Behrens, Paolo Vecchi, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holešovský, Emiliano Vavassori, Caolán McNamara, Cor Nouws and László Németh. Deputies are: Gábor Kelemen, Ayhan Yalçınsoy and Gabriel Masei. After Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, one of the first decision of the newly appointed BoD was to suspend the Russian company RusBITech from the foundation’s Advisory Board.

In late February, we started working on TDF’s Annual Report, creating most of the content and visuals with LibreOffice, and collecting images from community events for the final version. The final booklet is entirely produced with free software (LibreOffice and GIMP for tweaking images, Scribus for creating the layout, and the free Croscore fonts: Carlito and Caladea).

In early March, the project announced LibreOffice 7.3.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, providing a solution to LibreOffice 7.3 bugs such as the Auto Calculate regression on Calc, the crashes running Calc when lacking AVX instructions and the crashes related to the Skia graphic engine on macOS. On March 8th, we celebrated the International Women’s Day, which was followed by the release of LibreOffice 7.2.6 Community.

In mid March, we announced the participation of LibreOffice to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the 10th straight year. During the month, we also celebrated Document Freedom Day 2022, and announced several communication channels for the LibreOffice community in India: Matrix and Telegram. At the end of the month, the project released LibreOffice 7.3.2 Community.

In late April, The Document Foundation signed the Open Letter for the Right to Install any Software on any Device, to support Free Software Foundation Europe’s campaign together with 38 other organizations.

At the same time, the 2022 edition of the Latin-American LibreOffice Conference was announced. The event, organized by the Brazilian community, was scheduled for August 25 and 26 at the Catholic University of Brasília, in the Taquaritinga area of Federal District.

In May, we organized the “Month of LibreOffice” campaign, which gave contributors the opportunity to thank other members of the community for their work by awarding a sticker or a mug, a hoodie, a T-shirt or a rucksack. During the month we also released LibreOffice 7.3.3 Community and LibreOffice 7.2.7 Community.

In mid May we announced the LibreOffice Conference 2023, scheduled for the month of September, from Thursday, September 29th, to Saturday, October 1st, in Milan, Italy. At the same time, we announced the call for papers and the sponsorship packages.

In late May, several representatives from the LibreOffice project and the ecosystem companies allotropia and Collabora attended the Univention Summit 2022 in Bremen, northern Germany. They had a stand with LibreOffice merchandise, talked to visitors and answered questions.

In early June, the marketing team announced the availability of the index of LibreOffice training videos, which is available on this blog in the Media Hub section. The index is for videos in English.

In June, we announced LibreOffice 7.3.4 Community, followed in July by LibreOffice 7.3.5 Community.

In August, we finalized all materials for the announcement of interoperability focused LibreOffice 7.4, with the press release localized in many languages thanks to volunteers from several native language communities. Thanks to this large effort, press releases are reaching journalists in their idiom, and this increases the chances of getting published.

In late August, the LibreOffice LATAM Conference gathered around 400 people, among them students and IT professionals, and was opened to the public on Thursday August 25th in a ceremony chaired by Prof. Wesley Sepulveda, representing UCB, Lothar Becker (formerly on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation) and Olivier Hallot representing the LibreOffice community.

In September, we announced LibreOffice 7.3.6 Community, and at the same time we celebrated the 10,000th follower on our Mastodon account (Fosstodon server). Later in the month, we announced LibreOffice 7.4.1 Community, and released LibreOffice on Apple’s Mac App Store.

At the end of the month, the LibreOffice community gathered in Milan for the LibreOffice Conference 2022, from September 29 to October 1st. During the event, which started on September 26 with internal meetings of TDF Team, followed by community meetings, we celebrated the project’s 12th anniversary.

In early October, we announced the release of LibreOffice 7.4.2 Community, and the availability of LibreOffice on the Microsoft Store. We also announced the election for the next Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Following the discussions at the conference, we also announced the Liaison role for Native Language Communities.

In November, which was another “Month of LibreOffice”, with TDF awarding stickers, glass mugs, T-shirts and hoodies, we announced both LibreOffice 7.3.7 Community and LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community. We also launched the Call for Papers for the LibreOffice Technology FOSDEM DevRoom, and welcomed Stéphane Guillou as a member of TDF Team in the role of QA Analyst for LibreOffice.

During the month, LibreOffice’s Indonesian community collaborated with the Organizing Committee of the Indonesia Linux Conference 2022, to hold a short presentation: “Implementation of LibreOffice in the Ecosystem at a University”.

In December, the Italian community gathered in Empoli, Tuscany, for the LibreItalia Conference. The event opened with welcome speeches by President Enio Gemmo and Gruppo Operativo Linux Empoli (GOLEM), followed by those of Flavia Marzano and Professor Andreas Formiconi of the University of Florence on the importance of FOSS for Education.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

Bringing new community members on board and helping them get started is an essential part of our work. Here’s what we did in 2022

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Onboarding tools and sites

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 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 2022, 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).

Mentors at The Document Foundation

Thanks to donations, TDF has a team of mentors who help newcomers in the project to get started. Throughout 2022, Hossein Nourikhah (Developer Community Architect) and Ilmari Laukahangas (Development Marketing) interviewed and assisted interested newcomers, explaining how our projects and communities work, and showing them areas where they might like to get involved. We at TDF find this more “personal” approach to be more effective than just telling people to sign up to a mailing list, or read a wiki page.

To assist new volunteer programmers, Hossein wrote blog posts and guides for modifying and building LibreOffice’s source code. This is a daunting task for many new developers, especially given the size of LibreOffice’s codebase, but the guides illustrated some basic ways to get started and make changes that can benefit all users of the suite.

Month of LibreOffice

In May and November 2022, we ran “Month of LibreOffice” social media and blog campaigns specifically targeted at new contributors – ie LibreOffice users who found the software useful, but weren’t yet contributing to the project itself. We showed them how to get involved in LibreOffice (in simple steps), highlighted their contributions, and rewarded them with some merchandise, such as stickers and T-shirts.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!