Meetings Archives - Page 4 of 30

LibreOffice joined Software Freedom Day celebrations in Nepal 😊

2024-10-032024-10-04

On September 21, free and open source software (FOSS) enthusiasts celebrated the 21st worldwide Software Freedom Day. Our community members in Nepal were not behind with the celebrations either: they were active supporting small open source communities and connecting them for the greater good in the LibreOffice community. Here’s their report:

Suraj Bhattarai, LibreOffice liaison in Nepal, was available at the LibreOffice booth at the Software Freedom Day celebration by Open Source Klub (NOSK) at Nepal College of Information and Technology (NCIT), Lalitpur.

He described how the LibreOffice booth was so busy and engaging. In particular, the LibreOffice community supported the event with fun games, swag, candies, and engagement – all while advocating for the best free and open source office suite. The booth included amazing LibreOffice merchandise, such as T-shirts, tote-bags, water-bottles, round pin plastic badges, flyers, a variety of stickers, beer mats, candies, and so forth.

The booth had a LibreOffice crossword game, and showed LibreOffice 24.8 on a display for hands-on testing. There was also a presentation deck for newbies, and some verbal support/assistance to improve the LibreOffice experience and customization for easier navigation within the user interface. Suraj also mentioned that around three quarters of the people who appeared at the booth for a quick “hello” mentioned hearing about or knowing and using LibreOffice in their home or workspace.

The event was mainly joined by students across Kathmandu valley, open source contributors, club alumni, and veteran FOSS contributors/kickstarters in Nepal. Apart from the event itinerary and other activities, the LibreOffice “paper plane contest” received major attention and everyone seems to have enjoyed their paper plane flight to software freedom!

The winner was awarded a 750ML aluminum water bottle, with the LibreOffice logo printed on it. Suraj concluded the competition with the 3R principle and the analogy of releasing paperwork and transitioning to digital open source office suites for document-related work pieces. The college administration expressed some interest in replacing Microsoft Office and migrating the campus computers to LibreOffice suite.

Similarly, Suraj also delivered a recorded talk named “Diversity, Inclusion and Community Model in Free Software Communities” at Birendra Multiple Campus, Chitwan. There, the Software Freedom Day celebration was hosted by the Birendra Open Source Club (BOSC) with support from the LibreOffice community.

The aim of the talk was to deepen and bridge the relationship of the club with the LibreOffice community and LibreOffice activities/contributions in the future. Previously, the club contributed greatly to the success of a local event: the LibreOffice Localization Sprint 2023. Achyut Koirala, the acting president of the on-campus club, represented the LibreOffice community there.

While Suraj himself couldn’t be present, Achyut Koirala together with Shreeram Lamichhane communicated the positive feedback from the recorded talk Suraj had shared. As a closing remark, Achyut thanked the LibreOffice community as a whole for the inclusive community model and for welcoming their community into the project.

And finally, Nirjal Bhurtel, representing LibreOffice’s local community, did the same at Kathmandu University where the celebration was hosted by their own on-campus community. Kathmandu Open Source Community has been the veteran contributor when it comes to the history of contributions from Nepal in the LibreOffice project.

TDF says: Many thanks to Suraj and the Nepalese community for the great work! And as a bonus, here’s a video from the aforementioned paper plane contest:

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V Latin American LibreOffice Congress – A meeting point for the entire Latin American community

2024-09-062024-09-06

Our community in the region writes:

After successful previous events in Paraguay, Brazil and Mexico, the largest event of the LibreOffice project in Latin America arrives in Uruguay.

With the aim of bringing together users and collaborators to promote the dissemination of knowledge and experiences related to LibreOffice, the 2024 edition of the Latin American Congress will be held on December 5 and 6, at Espacio Colabora, in Montevideo.

For the realization of the event, the LibreOffice Project has the support of several local Free Software collectives: Resistencia Programada, Impulso Libre, GNLUG and Undernet.

Guest speakers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Spain, Italy and France will present tutorials on the use of the applications and ways to collaborate with the project. The schedule and registration link will be released shortly on the event’s official website.

LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 in Taipei – Government Migration and Community Experiences Sharing

2024-08-272024-08-27

Our Taiwanese community reports back from a recent event:

The LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was held in Taipei from 2 – 3 August. This conference was suspended for several years due to the pandemic and was relaunched in Indonesia last year.

In addition to the local community, there were many partners from the Japanese and Indonesian communities, as well as experts from Germany and Italy, representing The Documentation Foundation and the Open Document Format Technical Committee, who attended this conference.

The main visual design of the conference was developed by students at the Open Design Club in National Chengchi University. They boldly adopted the theme of “rice” since that’s a common staple food in Asian countries, and created a series of exquisite logos, icons and merchandise.

Staff in Government Day and the main poster

There were two main topics in this conference: Government Day and Community Day.

Government Day

The first day, “Government Day”, focused on Open Document Format (ODF) policy and “Public Money, Public Code” (PMPC). Six scholars and experts along with LibreOffice community members were invited to give talks, which covered topics from policy theory to practical practices when adopting ODF and PMPC in government. The audience was mostly made up of users from central and local government units.

The first speaker was Lothar Becker, co-chairman of TDF’s Certification Committee and also a board member of Open Source Business Alliance in Germany. This talk summarized lessons learned from 25 years of migration experiences to LibreOffice Technology in governmental organizations, from famous ones like the “LiMux” project in Munich, to up-to-date migration projects for 30,000 PCs in the government of the German state Schleswig-Holstein.

The second speaker was Prof. Naiyi Hsiao, the chair of Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University. This session explored what and why the PMPC practice has encountered legal and administrative concerns among the diverse stakeholders.

The third speaker was Director Cheng Ming Wang, the general director of Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for the ODF policy in Taiwan. His talk introduced three aspects of Taiwan’s ODF promotion: why Taiwan promotes ODF; the process and current status of ODF promotionl and the next steps.

The fourth speaker was Svante Schubert, co-chairman and co-editor of the ODF Technical Committee. His talk briefly gave an introduction to ODF and provided an update. In addition, he explained how the TDF-hosted ODF Toolkit is facilitating daily ODF usage (like for automated document translation).

The fifth speaker was Italo Vignoli, Board of Directors member of The Document Foundation. His talk discussed the role of open source software and open standards in digital sovereignty. Today, user-created content – and the ability to share it transparently – is in the hands of a few companies that take advantage of users’ limited digital culture. This situation can only be overcome by moving from proprietary to open source software and from proprietary to open standards.

The last session was from Prof. Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the Associate Research Fellow/Professor of Institute of Information Science in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. In this presentation, he highlighted the important roles of data infrastructure in facilitating the development and sharing of communal digital resources, and related the practice of communal data infrastructure to the Public Money Public Code (PMPC) initiative.

Group photo of Government Day

Community Day

The second day of the conference was dedicated to the LibreOffice community, and was organized as a COSCUP session track. Community members from Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, and Japan shared various topics. Italo Vignoli spoke about the history and evolution of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. Lothar Becker shared several funny and ridiculous stories from his experiences helping different organizations to adopt LibreOffice. Two LibreOffice Certified Profession Trainers from Taiwan, Kai-Ju Tsai and Teresa Hou, demonstrated advanced applications of Writer and Calc. The Indonesian community focused on visual design, sharing their experiences in creating presentation templates, vector graphics and themes for LibreOffice.

Additionally, a member of the team who organized last year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference in Indonesia discussed the challenges and joys of planning international events. The Japanese community shared their difficult experiences in advocating LibreOffice to local governments and private sectors in Japan, resonating deeply with participants from other countries!

Italo Vignoli introduced TDF to the Asian community

LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainer Kai-Ju Tsai demonstrated advanced usage of Writer

Two young Indonesian community members showed how they learned to make designs using open source tools like Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw

Additional Activities

In addition to the two-day main topics, there were also several additional activities.

On 4 August, the Open Design Club of National Chengchi University held a “Design workshop”. In this workshop, students from ODC and Indonesian community members divided into groups, and were challenged to design a movie poster in 30 minutes. Then they shared their experiences and work of designing using open source tools.

Students from Taiwan and Indonesian community members designed a movie poster together

On 5 August, Franklin Weng, the president of Software Liberty Association Taiwan, led a group of ten international community members, including Svante Schubert, Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker, to visit the Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for promoting ODF policies.

They were received by General Director Cheng Ming Wang, Senior Analysts Chun-Wei Tsai and Tsung-Yen Wang, and Section Chief of Application Development, Chun-Chieh Chen. The meeting discussed various possibilities for participating in the ODF Technical Committee and collaborating with The Document Foundation’s certification system, as well as exchanging views on future artificial intelligence (AI) trends.

Visit to Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs

During these days, several major Asian community leaders also reached an agreement that next year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference will be held in Japan. We look forward to LibreOffice/ODF/PMPC taking root more deeply in Asia!

LibreOffice community at FrOSCon 2024 near Bonn!

2024-08-20

FrOSCon is a yearly free and open source software (FOSS) conference that takes place in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. And this year, the LibreOffice community was present! We had a stand with information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, beer/coffee mats and more:

Over the two days, many people visited our stand and asked us questions: what are we working on, when the next release is due (in a few days!), how LibreOffice compares to OpenOffice, and how to get involved.

Thanks to Hartmut Schorrig, Andreas Mantke, Uwe Altmann and Stefan Unverricht for helping out at the stand. We plan to attend other events in the coming months, so stay tuned to this blog for details – and don’t forget about the upcoming LibreOffice Conference 2024 in Luxembourg!