FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. Normally it takes place in Brussels, but due to the pandemic, it’ll be online this year.
And the LibreOffice community will be there! We’ll have 25 talks about the technology behind the suite, open standards, and other topics.
Sophie Gautier reports from the recent Open Source Experience event in Paris:
It’s been a long time since we had a LibreOffice booth at a live event, so we really appreciated having the opportunity to meet again in in early November! Jean-Michel Coste, Régis Perdreau, Christophe Cazin, Italo Vignoli and I were present at the booth to answer questions from visitors and companies from the ecosystem. A big thank you to the team for their presence!
Our discussions with other FLOSS associations were fruitful, and the ambiance in the FLOSS Village was full of joy and events (there was a quick where people could win books and even a scooter).
We look forward for the next OSXP in 2022!
Thanks to Sophie and the French-speaking community for taking part! And indeed, hopefully we’ll be able to meet at more in-person events early next year…
LibreOffice 7.2 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in mid-August 2021 – see the release notes describing the new features here.
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing a Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.2 Release Candidate 1 on Monday July 19, 2021. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows.
Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular version (LibreOffice 7.2.0 RC1) will be available until the beginning of August when LibreOffice 7.2 RC2 will be released. Check the Release Plan.
All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki.
Daniel A. Rodriguez from the Hispanic LibreOffice community (and TDF’s Board of Directors) writes:
On Saturday June 26, we held the first virtual meeting of the Hispanic community this year. The activity was attended by several members, who are recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.
We have opted for a new name for the event, although the same spirit as last year has been maintained. We understand that this modification is in line with what we do every day in the different areas we set up for this purpose: talk about LibreOffice.
In addition, we launched the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv and the #libreoffice-es room on Libera.Chat. The interaction with the speakers was available through the integrated chat on Fediverse.tv, IRC (either with a client or through the web interface), or from the Hispanic group on Telegram.
As always, it was an open activity, free of charge and aimed at anyone interested in the office suite par excellence of free software. The event could be attended live from 16:00 UTC through the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv.
Almost immediately after each presentation, the video was made available through the chosen platform. Fediverse.tv is based on PeerTube, which is an open source, decentralized, federated web application that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on individual servers when viewing videos.
Thanks to Daniel and the community for organising the event! Videos from the talks are available here. We hope to have more events in the coming months – and, of course, there’s the LibreOffice Conference 2021 coming up in September!
Shinji Enoki reports from an event in Japan (original text here)…
LibreOffice Kaigi 2021 Online was held on Saturday, June 12, 2021. This is normally an annual gathering in Japan, originally scheduled for March 2020 in Osaka – but due to COVID-19 we were unable to hold it. This year, for the first time, the meeting was held online, with speakers and participants joining the Jitsi meet, which was also broadcast live on YouTube. The maximum number of connections was around 27 people for both. We are grateful to The Document Foundation and iCraft for sponsoring the event. Thank you very much!
The day’s events can be viewed on the YouTube archive. The slides are available on the TDF wiki.
The keynote speaker, Ahmad Haris, who leads the Indonesian community for LibreOffice, gave an introduction to our work in Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of many islands scattered over a wide area, and is the equivalent in distance of London to Baghdad.
The local LibreOffice Conference in Indonesia in 2018 was a success and the community is very active. Currently there are 795 participants in the LibreOffice Indonesia Telegram group. Translation is focused on UI, then Help, while QA events have been held with the help of Ilmari, and workshops have been held at universities. The Indonesian community has also contributed to the splash screen. Recently, they have contributed many templates, some of which are included in LibreOffice.
The well-received LibreOffice 7.0 introduction video was also made by the Indonesian community with music composed by Haris. The screenshot of the slide was retweeted more than 2,600 times, with the story that Indonesia has an island called Java and that Java and JavaScript are not just programming languages, but Javanese words.
Shinj Enoki reviewed the last year’s LibreOffice community with the Annual Report. In the public presentations, Kawano-san talked about “User-customizable web form issuing system using LibreOffice”, Annoura-san talked about “Making Neo4j native driver for LibreOffice”, Watanabe-san talked about “Taiwan’s LibreOffice from light user perspective and Around ODF”, and “Fast translation of LibreOffice Guide” from Meguro-san.
The status of LibreOffice/ODF adoption in Taiwan had been introduced by Franklin Weng, from the Taiwanese community, at LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12. Mr. Watanabe has researched and written a paper from a different perspective. It was interesting to see how the Taiwanese government is really working on it, and how it actually works in universities, from a different perspective than the Taiwanese community.
There were three lightning talks including jumping in and out, and the general Q&A afterwards was filled with discussions about why and what opportunities are available in Japan to promote open source software and LibreOffice.
The Japanese community holds “LibreOffice Hackfest Online” sessions every Wednesday night, to work on LibreOffice and exchange information, and “Online Study Sessions” (the next one will be on September 4) to exchange know-how among users every three to four months. Check out Connpass and join the events that interest you.
Many thanks to everyone in the Japanese community for all their great work! And to everyone reading this who wants to spread the word about LibreOffice in other areas/languages, drop us a line and let’s work together 👍
While many pandemic restrictions around the world are still in place, some smaller events are finally becoming possible. Sidorela Uku from the Albanian LibreOffice community reports from a recent event in Tirana, which hosted the LibreOffice Conference 2018:
There were eight people present at this meeting. We had a short presentation about LibreOffice – what it includes, and its features. Also, we introduced the various ways how someone can become part of the community. We are planing to have more events in the future, as there are a few people interested in localization, but as well for people who want to switch and use LibreOffice. Also, we translated a few strings on the whatcanIdoforlibreoffice.org website, and pushed the changes to Gerrit.
Thanks to the community in Tirana for their work and support! It’s great to see some in-person events becoming possible again. LibreOffice users around the world are welcome to join our project, and help to build up local communities. If there’s no LibreOffice community in your area, drop us a line and we’ll help you to establish one!
