Category: Meetings

Free software projects, such as LibreOffice and GNU/Linux, are developed by communities spread across the world. Most of the work takes place online, but there are many events for developers and supporters to meet face-to-face. One such event is the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days), in Saxony, which took place this year on 16 and 17 March. And the LibreOffice community was there!

Stefan Unverricht, Thorsten Behrens and Mike Saunders had a stand with LibreOffice flyers, stickers, books and other merchandse – along with a PC to demonstrate the latest version of the suite. Of course, most Linux users are well aware of LibreOffice, but there were still various questions on these topics:

• LibreOffice Online
• Document compatibility
• Icon themes
• Localisation (including Sorbian languages)
• Creating extensions
• Improving documentation

In addition, Stefan, Thorsten, Mike and Katarina Behrens gave talks about LibreOffice, The Document Foundation, and EGroupware integration with LibreOffice Online. Most of the talks were in German, and you can find them – along with audio recordings – here. From the other talks, we learnt about schools in Chemnitz that use LibreOffice, along with small organisations and churches.

Thorsten summarised the event: “It was very nice, with excellent talks, and a good spirit like the Paris Open Source Summit. The venue was lovely, while the talks were well attended. We should definitely go again next year!”

Happy new year! But before we really get into 2019, here are a couple of short event reports from our LibreOffice communities around the world, for events in December 2018. A big thanks to the organisers for their work, and the participants – you’re all doing a great job to boost the community, improve LibreOffice, and share information!

Cyprus: METU NCC LibreOffice Event(s) 2018

During the last weekend of the year (December 28-30), there was a series of events at METU NCC (in Cyprus), organized by the METU NCC ACM Student Chapter. The number of attendees at the seminar was much lower than the last year, probably because of the holiday season, but interaction/result efficiency of the workshop/hackfest was better than the last year. Most of the attendees were from the Computer Engineering department.

All attendees completed the “getting started” part of LibreOffice development. Some of them submitted their patches to Gerrit, and some are preparing to do so. Here are the event pages on on our wiki: METUNCCLODev2018 and METUNCC2018.

Japan: Kanto LibreOffice Offline meeting 2018.12

On 13th December, at the Yahoo! Lodge (1-3, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), LibreOffice community members who are usually far away from one another met up for a chance to interact. At this event, participants had a question-and-answer session about translations, discussed some other topics, and prepared slides for the following day. Attendees included: Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki, Masaki Murakami Tomas Kapiye (from Namibia), Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi (Rwanda), Hatem Wasfy(Egypt) Rin Nakamura and Atsushi Ueda. Here’s the event page (in Japanese).

Japan: Open Source Conference 2018.Enterprise

On the following day, the LibreOffice Japanese team did a seminar. This time, the speakers were Tomas Kapiye, Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi and Hatem Wasfy(Egypt). Event page (also in Japanese). One of the talks was about “How African students contribute to LibreOffce” – click here for the slides, and here’s a video of it:

And some photos from the Japanese events:

LibreOffice’s worldwide community is active in many parts of the project – in development, localisation, documentation, design, marketing and more. There’s also the Quality Assurance (QA) community, which focuses on identifying and fixing bugs. At a recent event in Taiwan, a Bug Hunting Session took place to check bug reports, as Franklin Weng explains…

This event was based on a course in the department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University. Professor Joseph Chung-Ping Young directed this course named “FOSS Community and Development”.

On November 29, we held a three-hour “LibreOffice Bug Triage Experience” event. A total of 70 students from NCKU and three members of The Document Foundation (Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang) attended. First, Franklin introduced Bugzilla and the bug issue lifecycle: Report -> Confirm (Triage) -> Patch -> Code Review -> Close. In this event we installed the daily build master version of LibreOffice and focused on three things:

• For issues marked as UNCONFIRMED, we tried to reproduce (confirm) them.
• For issues marked as NEW, we tried to test if they has been solved in the master version.
• For issues marked as REOPENED, we tried to make sure if the bugs were reproducible in the master version.

Students searched for these three kinds of bugs and randomly chose one to examine. The three TDF members helped and guided students during the whole session. In a short time, students found that it was a lot easier than they expected, so they were quite happy, excited and confident. We roughly estimate that in total, more than 100 bugs were confirmed/reported as not reproducible.

Thanks to Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang for their help, and everyone who took part! Here are a few more photos from the event…

LibreOffice’s localisation communities translate the software’s user interface and documentation. They help to make a powerful office suite available to millions of people around the world, in over 100 languages! Biraj Karkamar reports on a recent localisation event in India:

Ten people participated in our sprint in Kolkata, on November 11. We made contributions together for the Bengali-India locale.

On November 4, we had pre-meetup on localisation portal basics. I gave the participants basic details on how to add suggestions and submissions in the portal. Also that day, participants created their profiles on the portal.

But in main event, we started with introductions, then we had a short recap on the pre-meetup. Then we had a hands-on portal. I showed the style guide of bn-IN locale translation, which we follow in open source localisation. Then the sprint started – which was almost five hours long.

Overall, the event was good and productive. Of course, it was fun too!

Thanks to Biraj and the community for their great work! See which other languages LibreOffice supports, and if your language isn’t on the list, help us to make it happen! Here are a few more photos from the event: