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Design the LibreOffice Conference 2021 logo!

Our next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 23-25, 2021 (and it’ll be online, due to the ongoing pandemic situation). LibreOffice developers, supporters and users from around the world will share their work, ideas and suggestions. And we’ll have fun with online social events and more!

But we need a logo. For last year’s conference, we had a competition and Kukuh Syafaat from Indonesia won with this great design, which includes the openSUSE logo too, as it was a joint conference:

So, got some ideas for this year’s conference? We’d love to see them – please send them to us! And also check out the rules below. Deadline is July 27 – please send your design to mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with the subject line “LibreOffice Conference 2021 logo submission”. The conference organisers will select the winning logo – and the winner will receive a bonus “mystery pack” of goodies and merchandise!

Rules

  • The logo should be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Attribution will be given on the conference website and other materials, but you agree that the logo can also be used without attribution where there is limited space (eg on T-shirts and stickers).
  • The design must be original and should not include any third party materials.
  • Both monochrome and colour formats are essential for submission.
  • Submissions must be in SVG format.
  • The design should reflect the LibreOffice community.
  • The logo should avoid the following things:
    • Brand names or trademarks of any kind.
    • Illustrations that may be considered inappropriate, offensive, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libellous.
    • Sexually explicit or provocative images.
    • Violence or weapons.
    • Alcohol, tobacco, or drug use imagery.
    • Discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
    • Bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against groups or individuals.
    • Religious, political, or nationalist imagery.
  • The logo should follow the LibreOffice Branding Guidelines.

So, let’s see your ideas! And thanks in advance for all suggestions. We plan to announce the winner at the start of September. Stay tuned!

Annual Report 2020: Website, blogs and social media

We use our website, blogs and social media channels to raise awareness about our work, share information and encourage new contributors to join the LibreOffice community

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

Social media

In January 2020, our Twitter account had 29,340 followers; by the end of the year, we had grown this to 36,996. 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 used automatic tweeting tools to post daily LibreOffice tips, using the same content from the “Tip of the day” box in the app itself.

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 https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice and started “tooting” content, often more focused on technical users, compared to our tweets and Facebook posts. In 2020 we worked more on expanding our activities here, and from January to December, we grew our follower base from 3,297 to 4,879.

Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 56,095 page likes to 58,516. 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 9,975 subscribers and 1,587,341 video views in January 2020 to 12,807 subscribers and 2,042,731 video views by the end of the year. The LibreOffice 7.0: New Features video (a fantastic production by the Indonesian community) amassed over 120,000 views – while the video for LibreOffice 6.4 had over 60,000. We also added some presentation videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2019.

Meanwhile, our community helped out with tutorial videos – in particular Harald Berger of the German community, who produced a series of professional-looking step-by-step guides to installing and using LibreOffice.

TDF website (documentfoundation.org)

The Document Foundation’s website provides general information about the foundation (overview, statutes, code of conduct, financials and reports) and its governance (board of directors, membership committee, members, advisory board, and engineering steering committee), and about LibreOffice certification, including a list of certified developers, and professionals for migrations and trainings.

During 2020, the website was visited 146,261 times, with 196,802 page views. Continent-wise, the largest chunk of visits were from Europe (57%), followed by North America (22.8%) and Asia (12.4%). And for operating systems: the most visits were from PCs using the Windows (64.1%) operating system, followed by macOs (9.2%) and GNU/Linux (9.0%), while for browsers: Chrome had (38.4%), followed by Firefox (22.1%) and Microsoft Edge (14%).

LibreOffice website (libreoffice.org)

The LibreOffice website provides information about the office suite and the document format, the various download options, how to get help, how to contribute to the project, events where users can get to know LibreOffice, and how to make a donation to support the project and the community.

In 2020, we added a language selector to the top-right bar of the website. This was implemented in response to a demand from the native language projects: many website visitors, using languages across the world, thought that the site was only available in English.

Even though we have a dedicated page listing the native language projects and their respective websites, it’s hard to find. So we added a bar at the top, with some of the most-used languages to attract attention, and a link to a page listing all language versions of the website.

Meanwhile, work progressed on a redesign of the website. LibreOffice’s current website has been largely the same for several years, and while initially it looked fresh and modern, it needs to be updated – especially to remove clutter and complexity, and work better on mobile devices. Volunteer Christine Louie helped to push this forward, and other volunteers joined in with designs and collecting feedback from users. We hope to show the results of this work in 2021.

During 2020, the English LibreOffice website was visited 19,939,066 times, with 47,589,717 page views. Most visits were from Europe (53.4%), followed by Asia (16.7%), North America (15.8%) and South America (10.3%), from PCs using the Windows operating system (83.1%), followed by macOS (6.6%) and Linux (3.7%), and the Chrome browser (49.3%), followed by Microsoft Edge (18.4%) and Firefox (17.9%).

Blogs

TDF’s blogs (such as this one) are essential for communicating activities inside and around the project, including new releases of LibreOffice, community events and support for other free and open source initiatives. In 2020, they were used to post regular interviews with community members and provide updates from team members about documentation, marketing, QA, design and more.

Blogs were also maintained by various native language communities including Japanese, French, Spanish, German and others. Thanks to the hard work of community members, we had press releases, tips and other articles translated into many languages, and picked up by local media organisations.

These native language blogs complement the information provided by the main blog in English, and by the two blogs managed by members of the design and the quality assurance projects, which provide updates about activities for the upcoming major releases.

In 2020, the blog had 184,538 page views (146,170 unique page views). The press releases for LibreOffice 6.4 and 7.0 were the most popular posts, followed by posts for minor bugfix releases.

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!

Contest for LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology logo

The Strategic Marketing Plan discussed in 2020 has introduced a couple of concepts – LibreOffice Ecosystem and LibreOffice Technology – which will be the cornerstone of LibreOffice marketing activities for the foreseeable future, and will be deployed on web properties, marketing materials, documents, presentations and merchandise for events. Now, we need high-impact visuals to stress the importance of these concepts for LibreOffice.

Based on the success of the community contest for the 2020 Anniversary Logo, which has provided a consistent visual image for presentations at virtual events in 2020 (and will be used in 2021 as well), The Document Foundation is challenging community members with the task of developing two different logos:

(1) LibreOffice Ecosystem logo, to underline the unique characteristics of the LibreOffice project: global reach, continuous research for improvement and high quality, inclusiveness, loyalty to copyleft licenses, smooth combination of paid and volunteer contributors, and eventually lots of fun especially at events. The LibreOffice Sustainability slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/4qLzRad8wNd8pFk.

(2) LibreOffice Technology logo, to underline the uniqueness of the LibreOffice platform, which provides a single common engine for all platforms, from desktop to mobile to cloud, and therefore a more consistent way of handling files both in ODF and OOXML document formats, which improves interoperability. The LibreOffice Technology slide deck provides an extensive description of the concept: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/Xw4A7mY6W6yJTqo.

LibreOffice Ecosystem logo is the most important one, so community members should focus their best energies on it. LibreOffice Technology logo would be nice to have, but not as important as the Ecosystem one, as this will be a logo that all community members should use.

As a reference, TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) are published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

Both logos will be used for presentations, event signage, merchandise and gadgets (like stickers). They should be easy to recognize and read even at small sizes.

Both logos logo must be developed with free and open source software, and released in vector-based (SVG) as well as bitmap-based (PNG, JPG) formats. The logo must be available in a square or nearly square version, plus other formats as appropriate. An example of a possible implementation should also be provided with the proposal.

Intellectual property must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), while a copyright transfer to TDF is not required. The authors must declare in writing that they are the sole owner of all rights related to the artwork they have developed.

It should be clear that this is not a request for a mascot, and any kind of proposal which could be interpreted as a mascot will not be considered. Also, the logo must have a global reach, and as such any reference to a regional styling approach will not be considered.

Logo proposals must be sent to: italo@libreoffice.org by Augus 31, 2021, at 11:59PM UTC. TDF Team will select the winning proposals, which will be announced – and used – during the LibreOffice Virtual Conference, from September 23 to September 25, 2021.

We look forward to meeting the authors of the winning proposals at FOSDEM 2022 in Brussels or at the LibreOffice Conference 2022 (location still to be decided), to celebrate their work.

LinkedIn Pages, an invitation to subscribe

The Document Foundation has launched the foundation and the LibreOffice LinkedIn pages a while ago, followed in late 2020 by the LibreOffice Enterprise LinkedIn page. These resources have never been promoted in a serious and continuous way, so they have grown organically during the years to reach respectively 1,112, 949 and 171 followers. Given the growing importance of LinkedIn as a source of information, it is now time to leverage the effective potential of these content resources for the growth of the project, especially in areas which are tangent to the FOSS ecosystem.

As usual, we need the help of TDF and community members to grow the number of people subscribed to these pages, and to add contents about community activities, product development, migrations, large enterprise deployments, and the open document format. In general, community activities should be published on The Document Foundation page, product development and open document format news on the LibreOffice page, migrations and large enterprise deployments on the LibreOffice Enterprise page. We are happy to receive your content suggestions, and to put them online.

The Document Foundation LinkedIn page
To go to the page and subscribe, click on the image
LibreOffice LinkedIn page
To go to the page and subscribe, click on the image
LibreOffice Enterprise LinkedIn page
To go to the page and subscribe, click on the image

LibreOffice flyers for schools and universities – Help us to hand them out!

Our New Generation project is encouraging new – and especially younger – people to join the LibreOffice community, improve the software, and gain valuable skills.

We’ve created a flyer that can be handed out in schools and universities, and here it is:

Now, we need your help to spread the word! If you study or work in a school or university, we can send you some flyers that you can give to interested people. We also have versions of the flyer in other languages, translated from the source file (Vegur font required) by our community:

Want some flyers?

We’re happy to send them to you – just send us an email with some details, such as the school/uni where you work or study, how many you want, and in which language. Then we’ll get them printed and posted to you.

Thanks for helping to spread the word! To learn more about LibreOffice New Generation and share your ideas, join our Telegram group.

Writer Guide 7.1 is just out!

The LibreOffice documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.1

The book is a complete guide for users who want to explore the best resources of LibreOffice Writer, the word processor of the LibreOffice suite. Covering advanced topics such as styles, illustrations, indexes and table of contents, master documents, form design, document automation and more, this guide will bring your word processing skills to a professional level.

The Writer Guide 7.1 is a joint effort of Jean Weber and Kees Kriek, who reviewed and updated The LibreOffice 6.4 Writer Guide with the new features of LibreOffice 7.1, released last February.

“I enjoy writing user documentation for LibreOffice because it gives me an excuse to learn about new and improved features that I might otherwise not know about. The team members are good to work with, friendly and helpful. I especially want to thank Kees Kriek for reviewing all the chapters of this book.”

Jean Weber

Kees Kriek

The Writer Guide 7.1 is available for download at https://documentation.libreoffice.org and a printed copy at Lulu.com will soon be available.

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