Tender for design and implementation of crash reporter functionality in LibreOffice (#201512-03)

noun_84881_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement a crash reporter functionality in the LibreOffice desktop client application

to start work as soon as possible.

TDF wants to further improve the stability of its desktop office application, and get statistics and details on program crashes, based on the Socorro and Breakpad toolkit.

TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, design and implement the following work packages

Work Package 1: Client

  • implementation of the Breakpad (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Breakpad) framework/libraries into the LibreOffice client application
  • integrating functionality to collect and sumbit crash reports from the client application
  • provide an opt-in mechanism for end-users required to actively agree into data collection and submission

Work Package 2: Server

  • initial setup and configuration of the Socorro (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Socorro) crash reporting service within TDF’s infrastructure, which is based on Debian 8 and SaltStack
  • documentation of the installation
  • training of our infra team to handle the ongoing maintenance
  • optionally providing SaltStack recipes for automatic deployment
  • ensure the setup works with the client implementation from work package 1

Required Skills

Programming Languages and Framework

  • experience in programming with C++, the main programming language used for the LibreOffice desktop client application
  • experience with implementing Socorro and Breakpad

Other Skills

  • English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)
  • experience with the LibreOffice code base highly welcome

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

Applications from bidding groups are welcome, so are bids on individual work packages. Companies with certified LibreOffice developers are preferred over other applicants.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Tender to develop and incorporate usability metrics collection for LibreOffice (#201512-02)

noun_158928_ccThe Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

develop and incorporate usability metrics collection for LibreOffice

to start work as soon as possible.

In order to improve the user interface, human interaction and usability of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, implement a usability metrics collection feature to be incorporated into the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X versions of the free office suite. The project consists of:

  1. planning and conception of features and clicks to track in close contact with our UX team, with preselection and prioritization of the features
  2. installation and configuration of a server part within TDF’s infrastructure, which is based on Mozilla’s UITelemetry (see and http://bwinton.github.io/d3Experiments/contextmenu.html for further details) and defines the format for the client part
  3. a client part, that not only counts how often features have been used, but also provides further metrics; some samples of items that need tracking are
    1. the location of the click action in the menu, as sometimes duplicates exist
    2. which context menu was used
    3. whether a certain feature was invoked by a single click, by click and hold, by a drop down click or by a multi click
    4. from which application clicking on the close document/window ‘X’ (.CloseDoc) and close application ‘X’ (.Quit) occurs
    5. whether the user used the enter key, mouse click or an accelerator to open a menu item
    6. how the app was opened (via command line, start menu, start center, or by opening a document)
    7. in which toolbar a button was clicked, as some buttons are in multiple toolbars, and users can add buttons to toolbars individually
    8. which slide transitions and object animations are used most in Impress
    9. the concrete action/command sequence: which action was used by the user, and which was the next action used after that (e.g. inserting an image and then adding a caption)
    10. which menu bar keystroke sequences are used (e.g. Alt+F + O)
    11. which icon theme, font list and theme name the user has active

      Work on the client part also involves storing collected metrics data locally in the user profile with transmission to the server part when connectivity is in place.
  4. an opt-in mechanism for the client part, so users have to actively enable the feature before any data is collected and transferred

With this feature, TDF – amongst other improvements – aims to:

  • improve the menus, toolbars and the sidebar
  • show the most popular inserted special characters for use in a future drop down
  • show the most popular bullet/numbering styles for use in a future drop down

Work is to be carried out in the source code of the current master branch of LibreOffice, as available in our git repository at http://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/libreoffice/core.git

Required Skills

Programming Languages

  • C++ for the LibreOffice client part
  • knowledge about Mozilla’s UITelemetry for the server part

Other Skills

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Companies and individuals applying can be located anywhere in the world.

Bids on individual work packages (#1-#4) are welcome.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than January 29, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by March 1, 2016 should consider that their application, after careful review, could not be considered.

TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201512-01) – User Experience Mentor

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

User Experience Mentor

to start work as soon as possible.

We are looking forward to integrate user experience deeper into our development processes. The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, may include any of:

Main goals

  • acting as a peer of other UX volunteers
  • working with developers to find out what is technically possible and makes sense
  • growing the UX/design contributions and contributor base via outreach, and searching for good contributions in various forms (mailing lists, g+, irc, blog)
  • research in bugzilla, searching for consensus for ux-advice bugs

Main tasks

  • mentoring new contributors in the user experience community, to introduce them the existing workflows
  • volunteer inclusion: both UX/design, and also developers interested in hacking user interface
  • growing the contributor base and doing community outreach
  • organizing remote UX meetings (via phone, video conference or IRC) and in-person
  • establishing and fostering coordination and communication between developers, the user experience team, marketing and design, acting as a gateway between these

Other tasks

  • conducting surveys to improve the LibreOffice user experience and presenting results to the community
  • working on improving existing LibreOffice Glade-based dialogues and drafting/developing new ones
  • working with others on concepts, designs, strategies to evolve the LibreOffice user interface, drafting new user interface elements
  • prototyping
  • identification of EasyHacks to lower the entry barrier to the UX community
  • triaging ux-advice bugs in bugzilla

Tasks have to be carried out in joint cooperation with our existing developer, marketing and UX/design community, and with our Development Mentoring Lead.

The role requires the following:

  • experience using LibreOffice
  • experience in interacting with the LibreOffice community or another large open source project
  • working closely with our volunteer community on tooling, processes and means of collaboration
  • a track record in user experience and design
  • advantageous: teaching/mentoring

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place at 1400 or 1500 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The job is offered on a freelance basis. Work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at no later than January 8, 2016. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by February 8, 2016 your application could not be considered.

TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201510-02) – Documentation Lead

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Documentation Lead

to start work as soon as possible. The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, includes amongst other items:

  • Mentor and train new members of the documentation project: how we do things, how to use the tools, and writing style as needed
  • Guide and coordinate work: what needs to be done when, set priorities
  • Set standards and templates
  • Maintain Contributors Guide, which includes Style Guide
  • Improve and enhance the online help, including building and mentoring a community to work on it
  • Research, write and edit, as needed to fill gaps when volunteers contributions are lacking
  • Publish chapters and full books
  • Identify requirements for books and formats (ODT, PDF, ePub, HTML, other)
  • Develop a vision, a plan and a strategy for documentation, to include things like version tracking, workflow, scheduling and recruitment
  • Identify other forms of documentation that we should do, either in addition to, or instead of, the user guide books we’ve been producing
  • Liaise and coordinate with marketing, translation, other user support, Help

The role requires the following:

  • Experience using LibreOffice and other open source tools (such as GIMP)
  • Experience in interacting with the LibreOffice community or another large open source project
  • Working closely with our volunteer community on tooling, processes and means of collaboration
  • Project management skills
  • Technical writing and/or editing to know what’s involved, what’s realistic etc.
  • Advantageous: teaching/mentoring
  • Advantageous: native English speaker, or similar level of skill
  • Advantageous: Familiarity with and proven contribution to Open Source project documentation

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place at 1400 or 1500 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The job is offered on a freelance basis. Work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than November 27, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by December 18, 2015 your application could not be considered.

Tender for design and implementation of “All about LibreOffice” community and developer dashboard (#201510-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

design and implement an “All about LibreOffice” community and developer dashboard

to start work as soon as possible.

TDF wants to invest in a webpage showing latest activity, summaries and trends of the LibreOffice project in all areas, like development, QA, user-to-user support and other key areas of the project. The developed webpage should be easily extensible for developers providing scripts analysing current and historic data from various project infrastructure.

Further details on this project can be found at http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/msg03653.html

TDF is looking for an individual or company to, as a turnkey project, design and implement the following:

  1. a dashboard that displays the latest events and actions happening in the project, with a maximum latency of 2 hours
    1. on a webpage
    2. in RSS and Atom feeds for displaying in feedreaders and embedding into websites
    3. both including displaying of graphics, images and charts
    4. an integration into our Silverstripe content management system, for easy implementation of the generated content into our website
  2. extensive support of individual filters, queries, tags and summaries, to modify the output
  3. a feature to have fixed subpages for incorporation and reference in our existing websites
  4. support for filtering if an event creates or resolves an action item for a specific subproject
    Samples based on Bugzilla: regression filed would be qa-task-created (need confirmation/triage), regression triaged/moved to NEW (qa-task-resolved, dev-task-created), regression fixed (dev-task-resolved).
  5. collection of historic data for displaying and analysis
  6. a statistics feature, to output contributor numbers and top contributors like on our credits page (http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/)
  7. implementation of an easy theming features for designers to improve the visual layout of the dashboard
  8. adding data to the dashboard should be possible by providing a RSS or Atom newsfeed, created by common *nix script languages (Python, Perl, Ruby, PHO); optionally also support for C/C++/Haskell/Ocaml
  9. for #8, integration with our existing Gerrit instance for authentication
  10. proper documentation, including a working Salt recipe for deployment and installation of the dashboard on Debian 8-based machines
  11. regular blogposts about the project progress, and a final blog posts that advertises the dashboard to the LibreOffice community and invite contributions

The developer area should be a git repository containing scripts (Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP/etc.) generating RSS and Atom feeds. These will be triggered to be run in regular intervals of approximately five minutes and their output will be published for the database cronjob to pick up. The same is true for scripts creating images, graphics and charts. Ideally, the developer area regularly polls the hosted repository on e.g. gerrit for updates, thus adding new events/actions/summaries to the database (and thus the websites which present a view on the database). Additionally there should be an directory that can be read from the scripts, but isn’t part of the repository to store auth tokens/credentials for scripts to access their source systems (e.g. bugzilla, askbot, git, etc.) if needed.

Required Skills

Programming Languages and Framework

  • Frameworks, languages and tools used should be popular and widely used to allow the result to be community maintained and sustained after initial development. Extensibility should allow developers to refine the dashboard without deep insight in the used frameworks and tools.
  • We exclusively use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development whereever possible and the resulting work must be licensed under MPLv2.
  • For the creation of the frontend (website, feeds) a lean web framework like Django or CodeIgniter should be used. The use of a full-blown CMS should be avoided. Both the language and the framework should have a reasonable wide community supporting it (e.g. Top10 at http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html) and more popular that most of the competition at http://www.alternative.to/. The Backend DBMS is recommended to be PostgreSQL.
  • Website and feeds should be delivered by a small application based on a lean web framework presenting the data out of the backend database. The application layer should really be thin — it should essentially only present the database as as good-looking webpage and well-formed feeds. A cronjob running on this machine will fetch a set of RSS/Atom feeds and import them into the database.

Other Skills

  • English (Conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, your financial expectations (name the final price for the turnkey project), and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than November 2, 2015. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Applicants who have not received feedback by December 2, 2015 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

Extension of TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201507-01) – Development Mentoring Lead

The Document Foundation hereby extends the

TDF Freelance Job Opening (#201507-01) – Development Mentoring Lead

The new deadline for applications is September 24, midnight UTC.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

Find the role description below:

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Development Mentoring Lead

to start work as soon as possible. The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, includes amongst other items:

  • Helping new contributors to get started with LibreOffice code including:
    • building LibreOffice
    • getting started with patch submittal on gerrit
    • patrol bugzilla, github and mailing lists for patches uploaded there and help author to upload to gerrit proper
    • clarifying beginner tasks (Easy Hacks) and connecting beginners with domain experts
    • manage, update and watch the list of beginner tasks
    • select attractive beginner tasks and promote, share and advertise those
    • together with other TDF staff, manage quick access to TDF cloud resources for developers (see: Anytime Builder VMs for Developers and Using a VM)
    • Talking to people
      • make the first time contributors feel they are awesome
      • get them to IRC ASAP
      • watch them, ping them, ask them what’s the next thing they want to
      • work on, help them to choose if they are unsure
  • ensure changes are not lingering too long (2 weeks) on gerrit unreviewed by reviewing them or finding someone to review them
  • organizing, announcing and leading regular events for onboarding beginners (virtual Hackfests)
  • updating, steamlining and maintaining developer documentation
  • broadening developer resources with podcasts or screencasts for newcomers
  • reporting and blogging about interesting developments on LibreOffice code to attract new contributors
  • regularly check back with the existing volunteer developer base:
    • to identify and clear out stumbling blocks
    • to learn about reasons why volunteers move on
  • encourage contributors with basic experience to move on from EasyHacks to more challenging and interesting tasks
  • coordinate with QA, design and other groups in the LibreOffice community
  • put outstanding volunteer contributions into the limelight
  • take part in weekly Engineering Steering Committee meetings
  • reach out to other OSS communities (desktop environments, programming languages and frameworks, databases, IDEs etc.) and find opportunities for collaboration, integration and shared marketing

The role requires the following:

  • C++ coding experience
  • basic LibreOffice development know-how
  • excellent communication skills

Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software for creation of media. Speaking and writing English fluently is a mandatory requirement.

The work time during the day is flexible, apart from some fixed times when availability is required (e.g. during meetings, which usually take place at 1400 or 1500 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The job is offered on a freelance basis. Work happens from the applicant’s home office, which can be located anywhere in the world.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications, including curriculum vitae, your financial expectations, and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than September 24, 2015, midnight UTC. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by October 1, 2015 your application could not be considered.