LibreOffice Kaigi 2021 – Online event in Japan

Shinji Enoki reports from an event in Japan (original text here)…


LibreOffice Kaigi 2021 Online was held on Saturday, June 12, 2021. This is normally an annual gathering in Japan, originally scheduled for March 2020 in Osaka – but due to COVID-19 we were unable to hold it. This year, for the first time, the meeting was held online, with speakers and participants joining the Jitsi meet, which was also broadcast live on YouTube. The maximum number of connections was around 27 people for both. We are grateful to The Document Foundation and iCraft for sponsoring the event. Thank you very much!

The day’s events can be viewed on the YouTube archive. The slides are available on the TDF wiki.

The keynote speaker, Ahmad Haris, who leads the Indonesian community for LibreOffice, gave an introduction to our work in Indonesia. Indonesia is made up of many islands scattered over a wide area, and is the equivalent in distance of London to Baghdad.

The local LibreOffice Conference in Indonesia in 2018 was a success and the community is very active. Currently there are 795 participants in the LibreOffice Indonesia Telegram group. Translation is focused on UI, then Help, while QA events have been held with the help of Ilmari, and workshops have been held at universities. The Indonesian community has also contributed to the splash screen. Recently, they have contributed many templates, some of which are included in LibreOffice.

The well-received LibreOffice 7.0 introduction video was also made by the Indonesian community with music composed by Haris. The screenshot of the slide was retweeted more than 2,600 times, with the story that Indonesia has an island called Java and that Java and JavaScript are not just programming languages, but Javanese words.

Shinj Enoki reviewed the last year’s LibreOffice community with the Annual Report. In the public presentations, Kawano-san talked about “User-customizable web form issuing system using LibreOffice”, Annoura-san talked about “Making Neo4j native driver for LibreOffice”, Watanabe-san talked about “Taiwan’s LibreOffice from light user perspective and Around ODF”, and “Fast translation of LibreOffice Guide” from Meguro-san.

The status of LibreOffice/ODF adoption in Taiwan had been introduced by Franklin Weng, from the Taiwanese community, at LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12. Mr. Watanabe has researched and written a paper from a different perspective. It was interesting to see how the Taiwanese government is really working on it, and how it actually works in universities, from a different perspective than the Taiwanese community.

There were three lightning talks including jumping in and out, and the general Q&A afterwards was filled with discussions about why and what opportunities are available in Japan to promote open source software and LibreOffice.

The Japanese community holds “LibreOffice Hackfest Online” sessions every Wednesday night, to work on LibreOffice and exchange information, and “Online Study Sessions” (the next one will be on September 4) to exchange know-how among users every three to four months. Check out Connpass and join the events that interest you.


Many thanks to everyone in the Japanese community for all their great work! And to everyone reading this who wants to spread the word about LibreOffice in other areas/languages, drop us a line and let’s work together 👍

Annual Report 2020: Attracting new contributors to LibreOffice

Bringing new community members on board and helping them get started is an essential part of our work. Here’s what we did in 2020

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)


Onboarding tools and sites

Joining a large and established project like LibreOffice can be daunting for many. The software has a large codebase, and its sub-projects use a wide array of tools. In recent years, we’ve made efforts to simplify the onboarding process by linking more services together with SSO (single sign-on), thereby reducing some of the complexity. In addition, we’ve created Easy Hacks and similar “bite size” projects in other areas, so that newcomers can get involved quickly and achieve something – without months of work.

Currently, we have two websites that function as starting points for new contributors: What Can I Do For LibreOffice and Get Involved. The former was set up by LibreOffice’s Albanian community, and lets users click through topics of interest, until they find something they want to do. The latter is a regular page, with a list of sub-projects inside LibreOffice, and quick steps to make initial contact.

Throughout 2020, we posted regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog. In many cases, we emphasised how these contributors started off as regular LibreOffice users, but wanted to “scratch an itch” and start to make changes to the software. We highlighted the ways in which other community members helped newcomers to start working on projects, and used these as “success stories” on our social media accounts, encouraging others to make the step-up from being a user to an active contributor.

Volunteer platforms

Also in 2020, we used a number of online volunteering platforms to “recruit” new community members. These are websites which link people who are keen to volunteer with projects that may interest them. Users can browse organisations and projects in their country/region, see the list of open tasks, and then get in contact. We found that many people were volunteering because they wanted to do something for the public good, outside of their work – while others were looking to bridge gaps between jobs.

We set up accounts and listed projects on various volunteering platforms, including VolunteerMatch and Idealist (English), Vostel (German), Vapaaehtoistyo (Finnish), TuDu (Polish) and HeroClan, Um sem um tam and Zapojim se (Czech). Here’s what our projects look like on VolunteerMatch:

In terms of results, we received messages from various volunteers throughout 2020. For instance, one person reached us via Idealist and expressed interest in helping out with the LibreOffice website redesign. Although he didn’t have time to contribute in the long run, he introduced us to Christine Louie who took the redesign efforts further, and started to work (with other volunteers) on design concepts, user profiling and other tasks. So this was an example of a volunteering platform creating a network of helpers.

In the German community, we were contacted by Sabine Achilles who offered to help out with translations of the software and website content. She worked on translating various blog posts from English to German, which we posted on our German blog.

In 2021, we continue to explore other volunteering platforms. Ilmari Lauhakangas, responsible for Development Marketing at TDF, also schedules interviews with new contributors to give them personal contact from the start, and explain our tools and processes.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

ODF 1.3 is an OASIS Standard

The Document Foundation is pleased to announce that LibreOffice’s native document format – the OpenDocument Format for Office Applications (ODF) 1.3 – has been approved as OASIS Standard with 14 affirmative consents and no objections. ODF is a free, open XML-based document file format for office applications, to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts and graphical elements. ODF 1.3 is an update to the international standard Version 1.2, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 26300 (2015).

The OpenDocument Format specifies the characteristics of an open XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. It is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.

The most important new features of ODF 1.3 are digital signatures for documents and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking and document security, additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts, and other timely improvements. The development of ODF 1.3 features has been funded by donations to The Document Foundation.

ODF Technical Committee has received 3 Statements of Use from The Document Foundation, CIBlabs GmbH, and Collabora Productivity.

ODF 1.3 Specification can be downloaded from OASIS website.

Part 1: Introduction
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part1-introduction.odt (Authoritative)
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part1-introduction.html
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part1-introduction.pdf

Part 2: Packages
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part2-packages.odt (Authoritative)
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part2-packages.html
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part2-packages.pdf

Part 3: OpenDocument Schema
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part3-schema.odt (Authoritative)
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part3-schema.html
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part3-schema.pdf

Part 4: Recalculated Formula (OpenFormula) Format
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part4-formula.odt (Authoritative)
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part4-formula.html
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-os-part4-formula.pdf

XML/RNG schemas and OWL ontologies: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/schemas/

OASIS provides a complete package of the specification and any related files in a single ZIP: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/os/OpenDocument-v1.3-os.zip

ODF is the only document format which protects the rights of users as digital citizens, and allows transparent sharing of content without disruption, today and in the future.

Design the LibreOffice Conference 2021 logo!

Our next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 23-25, 2021 (and it’ll be online, due to the ongoing pandemic situation). LibreOffice developers, supporters and users from around the world will share their work, ideas and suggestions. And we’ll have fun with online social events and more!

But we need a logo. For last year’s conference, we had a competition and Kukuh Syafaat from Indonesia won with this great design, which includes the openSUSE logo too, as it was a joint conference:

So, got some ideas for this year’s conference? We’d love to see them – please send them to us! And also check out the rules below. Deadline is July 27 – please send your design to mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with the subject line “LibreOffice Conference 2021 logo submission”. The conference organisers will select the winning logo – and the winner will receive a bonus “mystery pack” of goodies and merchandise!

Rules

  • The logo should be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Attribution will be given on the conference website and other materials, but you agree that the logo can also be used without attribution where there is limited space (eg on T-shirts and stickers).
  • The design must be original and should not include any third party materials.
  • Both monochrome and colour formats are essential for submission.
  • Submissions must be in SVG format.
  • The design should reflect the LibreOffice community.
  • The logo should avoid the following things:
    • Brand names or trademarks of any kind.
    • Illustrations that may be considered inappropriate, offensive, hateful, tortuous, defamatory, slanderous or libellous.
    • Sexually explicit or provocative images.
    • Violence or weapons.
    • Alcohol, tobacco, or drug use imagery.
    • Discrimination based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age.
    • Bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against groups or individuals.
    • Religious, political, or nationalist imagery.
  • The logo should follow the LibreOffice Branding Guidelines.

So, let’s see your ideas! And thanks in advance for all suggestions. We plan to announce the winner at the start of September. Stay tuned!

Community Member Monday: Manuel Frassinetti

Today we’re chatting with Manuel Frassinetti from our Italian LibreOffice community, who recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Modena, Italy and I’m still living in this city. I’m just a normal free software user – a GNU/Linux user since 2001. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu, and then returned to Debian. The first love is never forgotten! 🙂

I use free and open source software and both in private and in my work. I have a Dell series 3500 laptop, an old IBM T42 ThinkPad in private and a HP Compaq 6000 pro at work, all with Debian 10. I am very much a beginner programmer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and also a beginner hardware technician. For both software and hardware specializations, I have not been in the world of work since 2003, since I became a tobacconist.

I don’t like obscure software updates that last an eternity without knowing what is being updated.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Now I’m working on wiki pages: I translate from English to Italian.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I’m part of the Italian LibreOffice guides localization team, in particular for Base, and the wiki pages localization team from 2018. I become a TDF member in 2021 thanks to Italo Vignoli and Marina Latini. I think it’s important to make a regular contribution to the TDF project: a little every day, it’ll become a mountain one day.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

In future, to live happy with my wife and to be healthy. About LibreOffice: I hope for better support in the database module. Right now I use Calc to do what I’d like to do with Base.

Many thanks to Manuel for his support and contributions. Everyone is welcome to discover what they can do for LibreOffice, build up skills and have fun!

Update from the ODF Technical Committee

While waiting for the official publication of ODF (OpenDocument) 1.3 as an OASIS Standard, after the approval of the ODF Technical Committee Draft at the end of April 2021, there are a few news updates from the ODF TC which are worth some publicity.

Since 2020, the ODF TC has two co-chairs – Patrick Durusau and Svante Schubert – and four co-editors: Francis Cave, Patrick Durusau, Svante Schubert and Michael Stahl. In the past, there were only two editors, and having doubled the number provides more bandwidth and flexibility.

The ODF TC has recently updated the project charter after more than a decade. The updated document is available on this page. The most important news is the commitment to deliver a Committee Specification Draft at least every year in December, consisting of RelaxNG schemas and written specifications, to avoid a long delay between two consecutive versions of the standard as in the recent past.

The ODF TC also aims to provide a fast-track for new ODF features of implementers, and publish the basic description (OASIS Committee Specification) more frequently, so features can be quickly  reviewed and embraced into an ODF Specification without the need to use the intermediate LibreOffice External namespaces (lo-ext), with all the associated delays and costs.

In addition, Michael Stahl and Svante Schubert have collected all the technical tooling required for the publishing of the ODF specification and the specification artefacts into an OASIS Github repository: https://github.com/oasis-tcs/odf-tc. The aim is to be able to deliver all specification deliverables by automation from command line, to become more agile, and improve transparency and quality by adopting modern toolings.

Last, but not least, the ODF TC is considering an ODF Plugfest in 2022.

Learn more about the OpenDocument Format here.