Yes, our YouTube channel has just gone over the 3 million views mark. Great stuff! We’d like to say a special thanks to community members who’ve contributed great work, such as the Indonesian community for the “New Features” videos (major LibreOffice releases), and Harald B. in the German community for his tutorials. (Note that many of the videos are also available on PeerTube.)
So, what are the top five most-viewed videos? Here they are…
We use our social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join us
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Social media
In January 2022, our English-language Twitter account @LibreOffice had 45,802 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 52,808. Our most popular tweets were for major releases, but we also tweeted customised images for “Community Member Monday” interviews with short quotes, encouraging more users to get involved with LibreOffice projects.
In addition, we focused not only on our own tweets, but also retweeting announcements from the LibreOffice ecosystem and community members. We liked and retweeted messages of support from end users – many of whom were surprised and thankful that a large project would show them support. To keep the content flowing, we retweeted popular older tweets, and responded to individual messages.
On other social media platforms, we focused on growing our account on Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. In 2019 we set up @libreoffice and started posting content, often more focused on technical users, compared to our tweets and Facebook posts. In 2022 we worked more on expanding our activities here, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 6,844 to 16,500.
Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 59,241 page likes to 60,209. We’ve noticed a gradual reduction in activity on Facebook over the last few years, which reflects its changing audience, and the move towards newer mobile applications. Nonetheless, Facebook still provides a good opportunity to interact with end users of LibreOffice, and every day we checked in to answer questions, get feedback, and post announcements/tips about the software.
YouTube channel
Our YouTube channel grew from 15,015 subscribers and 2,420,699 video views in January 2022 to 17,964 subscribers and 2,858,092 video views by the end of the year. The “LibreOffice 7.3: New Features” video (a fantastic production by the Indonesian community) had over 196,000 views – while the video for LibreOffice 7.4 had over 47,000. We also added videos from FOSDEM and the LibreOffice Conference 2022.
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.
Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who continued to produce a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using LibreOffice.
The Brazilian Community Gave a Presentation at the FLISOL-DF event (Festival Latino Americano de Instalação de Software Livre) about the LibreOffice Project.
Translation by Timothy Brennan Jr.
With the participation of Luciana Motta, Henderson Matsuura, Túlio Macedo and Timothy Brennan Jr., all members of The Document Foundation, the Brazilian LibreOffice community had the opportunity to give a presentation on the dynamics of LibreOffice in Brazil and their interaction with the international project.
Timothy and Luciana gave a lecture in conjunction entitled “I Don’t Know How to Code: How to contribute?” demonstrating how the LibreOffice project benefits from the volunteer and participative work of those who have foreign language skills, professional proofreading in Brazilian Portuguese, marketing and the promotion of software products, as well as coding in various modern computer languages where the gains acquired by individuals is always the unique experience of working alongside a team of professionals, both domestic and international. FLISOL was, additionally, an opportunity for a personal get-together of the Brazil team. This event focused on interaction and the exchange of ideas.
Team Brazil
FLISOL-DF, in the Federal District of Brazil’s capital, Brasília, took place on April 15, 2023 at the campus of Taguatinga (one of the Federal Districts satellite cities around Brasília) in the Universidade Católica de Brasília with the presence of Professor Wesley Sepulveda, and was organized by a team of volunteers lead by Henderson Matsuura.
Every major release of LibreOffice includes new features, thanks to our community of volunteer and ecosystem developers. But what can you do, if you want a new feature in LibreOffice but don’t have the technical know-how to implement it?
If you’re in a large company, you can engage with the LibreOffice ecosystem to get professional support. Or if you’re a regular end user, you can support individual developers for their work. For instance, Andreas Heinisch recently improved LibreOffice’s AutoText dialog with pre-filled text and a shortcut name, based on selected text, like this:
If users want me to fix a certain issue, they can fund me to fix a bug or implement an enhancement, like I did for a fire department in Italy (create Table of Contents from the current chapter level only), or some small changes for TDF (fixing a redraw bug in Calc, and the renaming of macro libraries).
Andreas has worked on 173 other fixes and improvements, as you can see on the bug tracker. Many thanks for all his work! And to other developers in our community: you too can consider setting up a Patreon page too (or similar system), to get financial support for your work, and provide a way for end users to fund the improvements they want.
Microsoft plans to raise the prices of its office software in Germany – and other services – significantly (article in German here). And not just once, but every six months there are to be “price adjustments”.
This is of course a problem for many businesses, organisations, schools and local governments that have limited resources. But it is also a good time to explore alternatives like LibreOffice.
LibreOffice is a free (as in zero cost) office suite, but it also offers fundamental freedoms to study, modify and share the software. Businesses benefit from the software’s data protection and security, and they can also take advantage of professional support. Other advantages:
LibreOffice can be installed in parallel with Microsoft Office for testing purposes
In the LibreOffice community, most of our activities take place online: development, design, QA, localisation, marketing and so forth. But we like to meet face-to-face too, at events and conferences – and last weekend we did just that, at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023 in Germany.
We had a booth with LibreOffice materials (flyers, stickers, pens and books):
As it was a Linux and free software-oriented event, almost all participants already knew about (and used) LibreOffice, but they had lots of interesting questions about our project.
Some visitors to our booth told us about deployments of LibreOffice in their businesses and organisations, while others talked to us about interesting use cases of LibreOffice in education and other areas.
Thanks to the Linux-Tage organisers for a great meetup! Now we’re looking forward to more events this year – and especially the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in September… 😊
