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Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

Videos

The year started off with preparations for LibreOffice 5.3, a major release that arrived on February 1st. We’ve found that videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users – and news websites often embed them as well. So I created a series of New Features videos for LibreOffice 5.3 covering the suite as a whole, along with Writer, Calc and Impress. So far they’ve had over 150,000 views in total:

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I also coordinated script translations from our diligent localisation community, so that the videos had subtitles in 17 different languages. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Around the same time, FOSDEM took place in Brussels, and I used the opportunity to record video interviews with various people involved in The Document Foundation. If you want to learn more about how TDF works, and what you can do to help the project, check out this playlist:

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After returning from FOSDEM, I also edited and uploaded LibreOffice-related presentations from the event.

Month of LibreOffice, and events

In May, we had another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from right across the project. But this time we awarded printed stickers to everyone who took part:

Over 300 contributors won stickers, and we gathered together some photos showing them in action on laptops, PCs, and even a bike!

Regarding events, I attended the MuvGoc ’17 BarCamp in Munich together with Thorsten Behrens. We discussed removing barriers in the digital world, and the relationship between open data and open source. See here for the write-up.

From 23 – 25 of June, I helped to organise a German LibreOffice community meeting in Berlin. We talked about various topics, including ways to bring in new contributors and link different parts of the project and community together – see here for the details (German version).

Website, blog and infrastructure

The LibreOffice download page was due for a facelift, so I worked with Christian Lohmaier (Cloph) on a new design: this makes the download button more prominent, provides better and clearer information, and is generally more pleasant to look at. Similarly, we worked on a restructured donate page, making it significantly simpler and more user-friendly than the previous version.

Meanwhile, I created a new Frequently Asked Questions page on the site, to handle some of the queries TDF receives every day. Community members can point users to these answers where necessary, and discuss them further on Ask LibreOffice.

Various LibreOffice-related events around the globe have taken place since the start of the year, and I collected information about them and wrote a short report. In addition, I summarised various updates from the Document Liberation Project.

If you haven’t seen TDF’s 2016 Annual Report yet, check out out – the TDF team worked together to write it and translate it into German.

Infrastructure-wise, Guilhem Moulin and I set up a new Nextcloud instance for community members to host and share data. We also moved the events calendar to Nextcloud as well.

LibreOffice timeline and LibreOffice 5.4

LibreOffice has a rich history behind it, starting with StarOffice in the 1990s and being open sourced as OpenOffice.org in 2000. To showcase many of the important steps along the way, we worked on a LibreOffice timeline on the website. Along with new versions of the suite, you can see news of major LibreOffice migrations and events that took place.

In August, TDF welcomed a new Development Mentor, Teodor Mircea Ionita (aka Shinnok). I worked with him to examine the state of our build system documentation, to see how we can make it friendlier for new developers – here’s my report.

Finally, for LibreOffice 5.4 I created another New Features video – and again, our localisation communities did a great job providing subtitle translations:

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So that’s the progress so far this year – but there’s more to come, with the LibreOffice Conference in October, another Month of LibreOffice in November, and preparations for LibreOffice 6.0 – which is due to be released early next year!

Introducing Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, TDF Development Mentor

Starting from July, the TDF team has increased by one unit with the arrival of Teodor Mircea Ionita, aka Shinnok, in the role of Development Mentor.

Teodor has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Iasi in Romania, his native country and city, where he is still living.

We asked Teodor a couple of questions in order to introduce him to the LibreOffice community.

How would you describe yourself?

I’m a passionate open source advocate and developer, Unix head and occasionally sysadmin. I’m also deeply interested and involved in systems, network and information security as an independent security researcher and aficionado.

On a personal note, I like to travel a lot, enjoy swimming and sun bathing, exchanging good reads and good movies (who doesn’t like them?), as well as interacting with peeps of various trades and life experiences and learning from real people, instead of avatars.

Can you outline your work experience?

My experience in the field spans across 10 years, casting a wide range of interest in programming and scripting languages, operating systems, network and web technologies, with a rather strong focus on systems, network and application development on Unix flavours and cross-platform technologies.

I’ve been venturing with many more technologies throughout my career path, such as web development, system administration and some electrical engineering. Suffice it to say that I cast a wide and evolving net of interests in this fascinating and rapidly ever changing field. Not sure where it will ever stop? 🙂

I like to think of myself as a passionate open source advocate and developer, and an eager contributor to several FLOSS communities/projects like the Nmap Security Suite, Openwall and the Qt project. I also contribute via technical blogging, participation at events and conferences and involvement in knowledge and code exchange based communities like Stack Overflow and GitHub.

As a seeder to the open source ecosystem I authored several open-source tools: a front-end to the John the Ripper password security testing suite, and a cross-platform desktop app for the Tarsnap secure online backup service, as well as less impressive projects like an FTP server and a small GUI version of the Netcat tool.

Gabriele Ponzo (left), Theodor and Xisco Fauli (right) at KDE Akademy in Almeria (Spain)

Which are your desktop configuration and preferred development tools?

Having been a longtime Debian user on desktop, server and mobile (Maemo, Moblin, Meego, Nokia N810/900… the first real “smart” phones IMHO, good old days), lately I’ve been using macOS as my preferred desktop platform of choice out of convenience and probably because I’m getting older.

I like having a decent desktop and range of GUI applications to choose from, on top of the powerful Unix backend and tooling that I need for my day-to-day work – and I think the Mac provides that to a sufficiently acceptable degree and atop of a good hardware lineup.

Rest assured, on my day to day routine I still interact a lot with the various Linux and BSD distros out there, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my virtual machine only USB3 SSD Samsung Pro drive.

I still sport a powerful Intel based desktop workstation, with a triple boot, built just a year ago paired with a 40” 4k display from Philips, but I find that I use it sparingly nowadays.

For editing I use Vim, for complex projects Qt Creator IDE, LLVM/Clang tooling for C++, Git everyday everywhere and that’s about it.

Why did you decide to apply for the position of TDF Development Mentor?

This one has a simple answer: I was actively looking to fill a gap in my clients roster and what I usually do in that case is look at the daily tools that I’ve been using for years, with a preference towards the open ones, that I would like and love to contribute to and push further.

Needless to say LibreOffice was one of those indispensable tools for me and lo and behold, the TDF was actually looking for the Development Mentor position! We got in touch, we clicked and so I started as soon as possible. Thank you TDF! I’m genuinely excited to be part of it and hopefully I’ll be able make myself a valuable asset in a short time.

Teodor is available on IRC using the alias shinnok.

TDF Team’s Interviews: Christian “Cloph” Lohmaier

Christian “Cloph” Lohmaier has been LibreOffice’s release manager for quite a long time. We asked him some questions, to not only get better knowledge about his daily activities, but find out his opinions about The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.

Q1. What is the typical day of a release manager?

Release manager is not a single-day job. The release process spans across multiple days for a single tag, or multiple weeks if you take a new version.

Release preparations typically start with preparing the translations. For LibreOffice, most language teams translate using Pootle, so translations have to be exported and then processed a little before they can be checked into the source repository. Most of the processing is just to reduce noise in the commit though, not changing anything in the actual translations, though we also have a tool that removes invalid strings (like for example duplicate translated names for spreadsheet functions, or commands with spaces in the formula editor).

The next step is looking into Gerrit, to see what patches are still pending, even after reminding people of the tag the days before. For smaller ones or for areas where I feel competent enough, I do the review myself; for more low-level stuff I hope to mobilize more experienced developers.

Final steps then are updating the credits documents and bumping the version string. After the tag is pushed, then it goes to building. While typically this is a non-issue nowadays, thanks to the investments in CI (continuous integration) and tinderboxes, there still might be some corner cases that might need an additional fix and a corresponding buildfix tag.

After the builds are done and uploaded to our staging server, the builds are announced to the QA team and other volunteers while they are being distributed to the main mirror network. This gives a chance to spot last-minute blockers or bloopers (like for example missing a configure switch). Then the builds are announced to the general public for testing.

Q2. 2016 so far for LibreOffice and for TDF: what is your personal perspective?

It is hard to keep track and especially for me I have bad memory when it comes to people’s names or to when a certain event took place. Some things feel like they were years in the past but just happened a few months ago.

But 2016 for me especially was also about temporary changes in duties and more specifically infrastructure administration. You might be aware that former infrastructure admin Alexander Werner moved to a new job, so there were quite a bit of thing to juggle until we got Guilhem on board to take over the infrastructure again. So my personal perspective wasn’t so much based on release manager duties (where also some training to reduce the bus factor was done), but rather a year of transitions, both at work and also in private life (I moved within the city).

It was nice to see the rough edges smooth out, to gain confidence in the decisions that were done in the past.

Q3. What do you see as the most important challenges for TDF in 2017 and beyond?

I think communication channels for the younger audience is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome. Mailing lists or IRC aren’t really used by the smartphone generation. It appears to me that in general people have less patience, expect a response within minutes – but that’s not what people like me are used to. There are ongoing efforts to expand the outreach, by using Telegram or also by the series of YouTube videos. But even then: a lot of young people don’t even use a dedicated computer anymore (except for gaming) – their phone/tablet or a set top box are their “computers”.

And on top of that, they don’t recognize the value of open document standards. They kind of take it for granted to be able to exchange stuff, but don’t care what magic makes that happen.

Q4. Where do you see TDF and LibreOffice in 2020? And in 2025?

Whoa, that is a tough question. Hopefully, by then we will have a fully functioning tablet/touch-input-friendly version of LibreOffice, and many more public administrations will offer files in free formats (ideally using LibreOffice to create and edit them :-))

Also, I hope that the communications situation will be sorted out, both in terms of which medium to use, but also in the sense of the language barrier. Unfortunately, many native-lang communities stay mostly amongst themselves – they stay invisible to the English lists despite making a big difference to the project.

Q5. You have been with the project since day one: which is your opinion about what we have achieved, and what we could have achieved?

I think it was a success story. I was especially overwhelmed by the support at the very beginning when it came to founding the Foundation. I really didn’t expect the €50,000 to be collected that quickly. And I’m also happy that even private end users value what TDF does, and support TDF with donations.

Q6. Are you contributing to other open source projects? If yes, which is your role, and which are your expectations?

While not really active, I’m using Mageia as my distro of choice, and am lurking in their IRC channel and am subscribed to the mailing list. So I do some user-support and occasionally did some packaging (although not as maintainer, rather I assemble a spec file that other people could use). That was still when I had an ISDN internet connection instead of DSL, so I don’t have any use for those packages any more – and the rest did find its way into Magia already.

Q7. Last, but not least, which is your personal hardware/software configuration? Do you have any preferred tool?

I mentioned Mageia in the last answer, that is definitely my desktop distribution of choice. I (still) run Gnome desktop, although with some tweaks and extensions to make it usable.

Hardware-wise: I really like the Dell XPS13 (FullHD variant) laptop due to its form factor for travel and mobile use, but my regular desktop is a low-power system using a mini-ITX board with an AMD A4-5000 APU with a 27″ monitor at 2560×1440. Gotta love big high res screens, even when not considered HiDPI. For building and tinderbox use I have a Mac Mini and a PC with i7-3770.

I’m a Vim user for most editing, but when it comes to Android (Java) development, I’m a fan of Android Studio. Often enough I need to connect to a Mac or Windows box via tunneled VNC or RDP, and for that nothing beats Remmina. Especially when it comes to mapping a PC keyboard to the Mac it’s a blessing. The built-in support for SSH tunnels is a welcome convenience.

For an IRC client I’m using Smuxi – that allows me to have it running on my main desktop and connect to it from the laptop, sharing a session. And finally Chromium-browser – it was simply ahead of the competition when Galeon slowly faded away and Epiphany was stripped of all the features I liked. Firefox at the time was too resource-hungry for the much slower systems I had back then. And then I stuck with it out of convenience mostly (but to be fair: I don’t have many complaints with it anymore, except no proper keyboard control for HTML 5 video).

So there you have it: GNOME desktop, GNOME-terminal with Bash/Vim/SSH/other command line tools, Smuxi and Chromium web browser are running constantly, followed by Remmina and Android Studio.

PS: I also like Perl for scripting.

Interview with Florian Effenberger, TDF Executive Director

The typical day of an executive director

My work consists of both administrative tasks – like accounting, correspondence, budget and contractual topics – as well as overseeing our team and making projects come to life. Whenever I have some spare time, I try to contribute to the German native-language community, the marketing project and our infrastructure.

The e-mail flow is quite massive with a couple of hundreds e-mails per day coming in as personal messages as well as on dozens of mailing lists, so my morning usually starts with prioritizing tasks and mails to structure my day’s work.

2016 so far for LibreOffice and for TDF: your personal perspective

2016 has been an extremely exciting year for us. LibreOffice adoption is continously growing, so is the community, and we welcomed several new members to our Advisory Board. Lots of events around the world took place, and every year when we compile the annual report it becomes obvious how much enthusiasm, dedication and passion our contributors have for LibreOffice.

What do you see as the most important challenges for TDF in 2017 and beyond?

During the last years, TDF has grown, which comes with costs in terms especially of time to define processes, establish structures and learn together. Right now, we gained routine for many tasks, so there’s room to grow and run more exciting tasks and projects.

With regards to LibreOffice, I think that mobile devices and online options are key to success, and of course, lowering the entry barriers to our community even further and growing the volunteer base, mentoring newcomers and keep people attracted to the community will always be an important part of our agenda.

Where do you see TDF and LibreOffice in 2020? And in 2025?

Looking at the short history of time during which LibreOffice and TDF have grown – we’ve been on the market since September 2010 – it’s hard to foresee where we will be in a couple of years. What we see and have today is way beyond our dreams, so I don’t even dare to guess what will come in the future. My hope and sincere conviction is that TDF will be a strong home for our projects, a welcoming and supportive environment for contributors from all around the world, breaking the barriers of languages, cultures, religion, beliefs and even timezones. I really feel like I have friends around the world, which is a wonderful feeling.

You have been with the project since day one: which is your opinion about what we have achieved, and what we could have achieved?

I am very proud of what we have achieved and where we stand. I feel sincere gratitude for being part of something so very special, for having friends around the world, for having the chance to contribute to something that does good for so many. The support we’re seeing from all over the world is just amazing.

Of course, we always can get better. Lowering the entry barriers even more, getting more contributors into the community, all these are goals we should work on continuously. The success we see is thanks due to so many wonderful people breathing life into our community, and I wish for that this motivation, enthusiasm, dedication and passion keeps up for the next years to come.

Are you contributing to other open source projects? If yes, which is your role, and and which are your expectations?

I’ve started my open source activities around 2004 in my early 20s and been with free office software since then. I am not a developer, but quite a bit into infrastructure, so when I do find time, I try to blog howtos and guides for various infrastructure and technology bits. I’m also a co-founder of the Munich Open-Source-Treffen (meetings) and the Munich Open-Source-Kochen (cooking), although I do not have much time these days to contribute to these regularly.

Last, but not least, which is your personal hardware/software configuration? Do you have any preferred tool?

My main working tools are Thunderbird as my e-mail client and calendar, extended with quite some configuration tweaks and add-ons, Redmine as project management system, and of course LibreOffice. A couple of additional tools like IRC, instant messaging, a browser, a terminal console and some more come to mind as well. Apart from that, I use a regular VoIP phone quite a lot, and of course my mobile.

A thing I don’t want to miss anymore is my dual-monitor setup – and the wonderful atmosphere at the shared office space I work from in my hometown Kaufbeuren. Work, especially in open source, is also always about people.

Marketing & PR at TDF in the second half of 2016

In terms of marketing and PR, a large free software project is quite similar to a large corporation. In fact, activities are following each other without interruption: major and minor product announcements, global events and local events, community fostering projects, and day to day activities (such as working with journalists).

In addition, there are the so called back office activities, which are instrumental for the success of the main ones but are less visible (and usually tedious). For instance, a major announcement has a burst of PR activities during the last week, which are based on a careful check of journalists’ email addresses, and on a thorough read of articles published during the last few months.

July is the month of a major announcement, which happens either at the end of July or during the first week of August. In 2016, we have announced LibreOffice 5.2, a feature rich major release, introducing – amongst a wealth of interesting novelties – document classification, a significant new feature for enterprise deployments.

August is usually the month before the LibreOffice Conference, and as such is spent finalizing the event schedule, and putting the finishing touches to the program.

September is the conference month. In 2016, the community has gathered in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic and a technology hub, at the local IT university. The event was organized by OpenAlt and backed by Red Hat, which has a large software dev facility in the city. During the conference, we have announced LibreOffice 5.2.1 and LibreOffice 5.1.5.

October is usually the month when we start planning the next major announcement. In 2016 we have worked together with the Design Team at the new user interface concept, which will be affecting not only LibreOffice 5.3 but also the following major release, and possibly even the next one.

We have discussed extensively the concept, because we wanted to provide users a clear path forward without leaving behind those loyal to the traditional LibreOffice UI, which will not be abandoned.

LibreOffice will offer a flexible user interface, where each user will be able to configure the UI to fit his working habits. In fact, with millions of users, it would be impossible to please everyone by offering only one option in term of user interface.

In November, during the Month of LibreOffice, we have prepared the UI announcement, while working at media mailing lists and monitoring articles about LibreOffice 5.2 (which have reached the record amount of over 2,000 in less than six months).

We have also improved the results, in terms of clicks, of our Google sponsored AdWord account. This is a fine tuning activity, based on the mix of keywords and the bid value associated to each keyword.

In December, we have announced the MUFFIN – My User Friendly & Flexible Interface – with a record number of over 20,000 visits (and over 80,000 page views) to TDF blog. It is an unexpected success, which confirms that we have chosen the right approach to an issue affecting a large number of LibreOffice users.

At the end of the semester, we are ready for a new exciting year (and another semester of ongoing marketing and PR activities, which will start in early January with the first draft of the documents for the announcement of LibreOffice 5.3).

Happy 2017

Mike’s marketing activities, July – December 2016


Donations to The Document Foundation help us to maintain a small team, working on various areas of the project including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. I help out with the latter, and as we come towards the end of 2016, I want to talk about some of the things I’ve been working on in the last six months. It’s been a really busy time, with a new release of LibreOffice, our conference and many other events and updates. And 2017 promises to be even better! But first, I’d like to provide a bit of background on my typical working day.

The first thing I do is catch up on discussions from the previous day. As you probably know, LibreOffice has many mailing lists covering all aspects of the project and community. I’ve signed up to “digest” subscriptions for some of them – so I get a summary at the end of each day. This is helpful for pinpointing topics of interest. Also useful are minutes from meetings, such as the design team or the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC).

Next, I check our IRC channels to see what’s going on, and what are the hot topics in the community at present. Then I’ll catch up with our social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. Sometimes there are questions from LibreOffice users that need answering, but in any case, it’s good to see what end users are talking about.

Once I’ve caught up with everything, I turn to my own email inbox in Thunderbird and look at my pending tasks. Sometimes I’ll have a bunch of smaller jobs to take care of (like proofreading and email responses), before I start working on a bigger project for the rest of the day, such as videos, interviews, blog posts, website updates and other jobs. We in the LibreOffice project use Redmine to create and track tickets for tasks that we’re working on, so that we can see how things are progressing and share ideas.

 

What I’ve done in the last six months

In July we were putting the finishing touches to The Document Foundation’s 2015 Annual Report, of which I wrote many sections, and I helped to translate parts of it into German. Around the same time, we were gearing up for the release of LibreOffice 5.2, so I made a technical preview video for our community, showing some of the new features to help with testing and documentation.

Following that, I produced more polished New Features videos for the world to see on release day – and in total, they received over 100,000 views. Here’s the playlist:

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Close to the release day, I worked with Italo Vignoli to contact journalists with information about the new version of LibreOffice, offering them to join us in press briefing calls where they can ask questions and speak to members of TDF’s Board of Directors. In addition, I worked on updates for the website, highlighting the new features with extra text and screenshots.

After LibreOffice 5.2 was released in August, we began preparations for our yearly conference, which was held in early September in Brno, Czech Republic. With some of the TDF’s marketing budget (which again, is thanks to generous donations!) I sourced some new video and audio equipment which I took to the conference. Along with various videos from the conference itself, like this wrap-up, I also made some contributor interviews which were also used in our Join the LibreOffice Community video. (And then, our community produced translations in many different languages, which I added to the videos.)

Bringing new people into the community is an important part of my role, so I worked on a redesigned Get Involved page on the LibreOffice website. (I also created a short URL for it: tdf.io/joinus.) This page makes it simpler for potential contributors to dive in to the project, in that they can simply click a topic of interest and get quick pointers on where to start.

Throughout October, I organised a series of LibreOffice Community Weeks on the blog, talking to different projects and exploring how they work. I interviewed contributors, looked at the tools that they use, and explained how to get involved, posting regular updates on social media to generate interest. In the end, we had new contributors in documentation, development and QA, so I plan to repeat these Community Weeks again next year.

November was another Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions across the project with badges and barnstars. This caught the attention of the Albanian LibreOffice community, which is running its own Month of LibreOffice throughout December – we’ll post a wrap-up on this blog when it finishes!

And then there were other tasks that I worked on over the last six months, including: updated training certificates, an acknowledgement document for new developers, contributor interviews for the blog, new items on our merchandise shop, and updates to the LibreOffice subreddit.

So with all that, here’s to a great 2017!

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