Category: Meetings

Community members from five different countries had a good time, and talked about holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference in the future

Event report by: Wally Lian, PR & Marketing Consultant, Software Liberty Association Taiwan

This summer is hot in Taiwan, and so are the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) communities! From the end of July to the middle of August, there were several big FOSS events in Taiwan. The first one coming on stage was the Debian Conference, which was held in Taiwan and Asia for the first time, and lasted for two weeks. Then, this year three big Asian FOSS events of COSCUP, Gnome Asia Summit, and OpenSUSE Asia Summit decided to merge together and held an event at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology on 11 and 12 August.

Besides these global and Asian FOSS events, there were also many interesting opportunities and plans going on. One of them was: LibreOffice community members in Asia planned to have a meetup during the joint COSCUP/Gnome Asia/OpenSUSE Asia event, and discussed holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference.

This meetup was held in the evening on 11 August in A+A space, which is a nice and friendly space for FOSS communities, also a community made up of several artists who use FOSS as their tools to create their artwork. The attendees included LibreOffice and other FOSS community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan.

The organizer, Franklin Weng, the current President of Software Liberty Association Taiwan and current board member of The Document Foundation, said that this meetup was an important milestone. “Now the Taiwanese government is going on adopting the Open Document Format and related office suites. It is very important to link our government and our people with international communities. Besides sharing our experiences of adopting ODF and using LibreOffice, we can also learn from many different countries and help each other,” said Franklin.

At the meetup, Franklin introduced the 30-second animation for LibreOffice Android Viewer, which was generated by LibreOffice Taiwan and A+A Space. He explained that the original idea was to raise the awareness of visual design in FOSS communities. Then he explained the meaning and special Easter eggs hidden in the animation, and showed a “behind the scenes” documentary for it. Then, the host of A+A Space, Michael Wu, introduced the wonderful work from A+A Space, including 3D graphs, 3D models, VR work, classes in universities, and so on.

Then everyone started to share their work and experiences. Rania Amina, who was responsible for visual design in the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, showed his wonderful artwork to attendees. Ahmad Haris also shared his experiences holding LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, which was a huge success. Shinji Enoki shared the current status of Japanese support in LibreOffice, and many events held in Japan. Daehyun Sung introduced himself and shared some interesting things in Korea, including the system North Korea is using.

Also, Bobby Tung, a senior FOSS member in Taiwan who also contributed a lot to W3C standards, shared the current status of Unicode support for CJK. Kevin Lin, a LibreOffice Migration Professional in Taiwan, showed his work on LibreOffice Online and Web form API usage. Shelandy Ting shared his interesting artwork using Gimp.

After sharing, attendees split into different groups and talked with each other. During this meetup, members from Japan and Indonesia showed interest in holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference. Besides conferences, attendees also exchanged experiences migrating to LibreOffice in organizations and public administrations. We believe that the adoption of the Open Document Format and migrations to LibreOffice will advance hugely in Asia.

A big thanks to the LibreOffice communities in Asia for organising this event! If you love LibreOffice and want to help spread the word in your location or language, check out our native language communities. Together we can help to spread the word about free software and open standards!

Native-language projects around the world help to promote LibreOffice by translating the software, building communities, and attending events. Muhammet Kara reports on a recent event in his home country of Turkey…

I am back at home after the Free Software and Linux Days 2018 in İstanbul. It was a small and cozy event. The number of attendees was lower than the previous years, but on the plus side, we had more time for each visitor. It was also a good opportunity to break the ice between different segments of the Turkish Free Software community.

We had a nice booth, jointly run by LibreOffice Turkey and GNOME Turkey community members, next to the Pardus booth. We gave out stickers to the visitors, answered their questions about LibreOffice, GNOME, and Free/Libre Software in general. Community members also had a lot of time to chat, and to discuss the current situation and the future of our community in Turkey.

We also had three LibreOffice related presentation/seminar sessions:

• LibreOffice Geliştiricisi Olmak (Being a LibreOffice Developer), by Muhammet Kara
• LibreOffice Sertifikasyonu (LibreOffice Certifications), by Muhammet Kara
• Açık Belge Biçimi (The Open Document Format), Nurcan Tür

And we now have all materials to set up a complete LibreOffice booth in any upcoming event in Turkey, thanks to The Document Foundation for funding the booth stuff, and the travel costs of the booth staff.

Please see the wiki page for more details, photos, and links to related tweets.

Many thanks to Muhammet and the other attendees and organisers! If you use LibreOffice and want to help promote it in your local region, join our marketing community and we can help you with ideas, presentations and materials.

Who makes LibreOffice? And who can get involved to make it even better? The answer is – everyone! For instance, the Nepalese LibreOffice community spent much of April 2018 localising the software, and at the end of the month, they had a fun meetup:

Saroj Dhakal summarised what they did:

• The FOSS Nepal Community and Kathmandu University Open Source Club participated in and co-organised the event
• For translations of LibreOffice, participants reduced the number of critical error strings from over 9000 down to 3808
• LibreOffice Online was completely localised during this event
• The number of active contributors increased from 2 to 35

At the end of the event, participants received a certificate, thanking them for their help:

So, great work by the Nepalese community! One of the main goals of LibreOffice is to make the software available in as many languages as possible, bridging digital divides across the globe. So all help from translators and localisers is really appreciated.

And as you can see, joining an open source community like LibreOffice is a great way to meet new people and have fun! There are many things you can help out with, from translations and marketing through to design and documentation: see here for more.

LibreOffice is the default office suite in almost every desktop Linux distribution, and the Linux community has done a lot to help support, develop and promote LibreOffice over the years. So we like to meet up with Linux users and free software enthusiasts face-to-face – and on April 21 we were at the 17. Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany.

This yearly event has been running since 2001, and is described as being “one of the oldest and biggest Linux-related events in the area”, with around 350 visitors. Christian Lohmeier and Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community set up a booth which had a screen showing a video of LibreOffice 6.0, along with stickers and (most importantly) flyers encouraging people to get involved with the project:

Virtually every Linux user has heard of LibreOffice, so we didn’t have to explain what the software does. But we talked about what the community is doing, some things we’re working on, and how people can help. One especially hot topic was LibreOffice Online – so we demonstrated the latest version, showing its collaborative editing features.

Many other Linux and free software-related communities were present, and there were talks on security, programming, networks and containers (eg Docker). In the afternoon, Mike gave a talk in German called “LibreOffice: where we’re from, where we’re going, and how to get involved”. On the whole, it was great to meet so many passionate FOSS fans, and we look forward to going again next year. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and said hello!

The LibreOffice community communicates mainly over the internet, using our mailing lists, IRC channels and other services. But it’s often good to meet in person, to discuss ideas face-to-face, tackle problems together, and enjoy good company over food and drinks! And from April 6 – 8, in Hamburg, we did just that…

Friday: Meet and Greet

Some participants arrived early and had a chance to explore the fascinating Hanseatic city of Hamburg, with its river, canals and lake in the centre (Binnenalster, shown below). In the evening we sampled local food at the Groeninger Privatbrauerei.

(Picture: Thomas Ulrich, CC-BY-SA 2.0)

Saturday and Sunday: Hackfest

Starting on Saturday, we had around 45 participants, who split into two groups. One group focused on a hackfest – that is, a joint coding session for fixing bugs, working on new features and sharing information. Here’s a summary of the achievements from each participant:

• Miklos Vajna: mostly mentored Patrick, Nithin, Linus and Zdeněk (aka raal)
• Michael Stahl: mentored Nithin and remote participant Heiko; worked with Christian Lohmeier to install a GUI text editor as an alternative to Emacs and Vim; reviewed some old Gerrit patches; and investigated regression tdf#77919 (it was already fixed on master but it wasn’t obvious how)
• Regina Henschel: worked on the topic “Make drawing layers ODF conformant”
• Tamás Bunth: mostly worked on HSQLDB migration; also picked a random Firebird-related bug
• Heiko Tietze: solved (remotely) issues with inline tooltips on tracked changes, with help from Michael Stahl
• Michael Meeks: tweaked, reviewed and merged patch(es) for a 5-10x speedup for VLOOKUP
• Xisco Fauli: spent most of his time trying to make LibreOffice Viewer work on Android emulator; also showed Marina Latini how to create a bisect repository from scratch
• Markus Mohrhard: reviewed patches for Zdeněk, and analysed a Calc memory corruption issue
• Patrick Jaap: worked on tdf#115094, a bug relating to misplaced images in tables when importing .docx files
• J-NA: worked on fixing up sw uitests with Linus
• Marina Latini: fixed Italian translation typos; worked on fixing a GPG problem
• Nithin: worked with Miklos on adding line feeds to section styles
• Linus Behrens: improved sw uitests, making them more pythonic with J-NA; removing unused includes
• Lothar Becker: explained the LibreOffice certification programme to Silva from the Albanian community
• Zdeněk Crhonek (raal): looked at building the LibreOffice Viewer app for Android
• Jan-Marek Glogowski: worked on font problems in the Qt5 backend
• Tim Janik: talked to people, discussing toolkits and technology
• Sophia Schröder: fixing up help, and some translation work
• Stephan Bergmann: mentored people; worked on fixing regressions with UBSAN, and fixing repaint issue in basic IDE
• Rheinhard: observed and interacted, as he’s writing about open source communities

So lots of great work from everyone involved – thanks so much for your contributions! The hackfest showed that meeting face-to-face is really effective for fixing issues and sharing information.

German community meeting

At the same time as the hackfest, a meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community took place. Last year we met in Berlin (text in German) to discuss various ideas and issues in the project, especially from a German-language perspective, and we followed them up this year to see what progress had been made.

Specifically, we talked about attending more conferences in the German-speaking region, with a more targeted focus: instead of just telling people what LibreOffice is (which most Linux users already know, for instance), we should focus more clearly on bringing in potential new contributors.

Then we turned to the topic of education. It was noted that the Citavi citation software no longer works with LibreOffice 6, and the community lacks materials that could be used to create courses (both online and in schools) about LibreOffice.

We also discussed having more regular face-to-face meetups. Silva Arapi from the Albanian community shared her experiences, but in a larger country like Germany, it’s difficult to get everyone together in the same place. So one idea was to organise more local events, like the Duisburg “Stammtisch” run by Andreas Mantke.

Finally, we set up some “action items”, including the creation of a new “Get involved” flyer for events, and a German translation of the “Get involved” page on the website.

Wrapping up

On the whole, it was a fun and productive event, with some familiar faces, some new faces, and lots of coding, ideas and proposals. Many thanks also to Bjoern Michaelsen and Thorsten Behrens for organising the event, serving up coffee and mentoring developers. And another big thanks to freiheit.com who generously hosted us – and even let us play on their pool table!

We plan to run more hackfests and local community events in the future, so keep an eye on this blog and our social media channels to hear about them: Twitter, Google+ and Facebook!