TDF Community Blog

Love LibreOffice? Want to help make it even better? Now’s your chance! The software is developed by a passionate community, spread across the globe, with many volunteers working in their spare time. And you can join them: not only is it a great way to build your skills for a possible future career, but also an opportunity to meet new people, have fun… And get some cool merchandise throughout November! So how does this work

Well, everyone who contributes can claim an awesome sticker pack at the end of the month:

And then, we’ll also choose 20 contributors at random to receive a piece of bonus merchandise – a LibreOffice mug, T-shirt or 10/20 anniversary hoodie (proudly modelled in the photo above).

How to get your stickers

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

• Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.

• First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.0.3”.

• Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.

• Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

• Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

• Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So there’s plenty to do! As the contributions come in, we’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us. And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win a bonus hoodie, T-shirt or mug as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• We started the month by chatting with Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, a long-time member of the LibreOffice community. He told us how he joined the project, what he’s working on, and where he thinks we should go in the future…

• Our yearly conference took place this month (more on that later), but before it started, we added merchandise to our online shop. It’s still there, so don’t miss the chance to get a cool 2020 hoodie, T-shirt, bag or baseball cap!

• There were two bugfix updates to LibreOffice in October: 7.0.2 on the 8th, and 7.0.3 on the 29th. With these releases, LibreOffice 7.0 is becoming a mature branch of the suite, and 6.4 will no longer receive updates after the end of November.

• Meanwhile, the Indonesian LibreOffice community announced the results of their Impress template contest. Check out the results – they created many professional and attractive templates for presentations. Great work, everyone!

• On the 19th, we caught up with Marcin Popko, who joined the project recently to help out with social media in Poland. Thanks to Marcin’s efforts, more and more people in his country are learning about LibreOffice – and indeed, everyone around the world is welcome to help us with social media channels in many languages.

• In technology news, TDF published a tender to finish the transition of LibreOffice to OpenDocument Format 1.3. If you’re a LibreOffice developer with some experience in this field, check out the requirements – it might be something perfect for you…

• Our documentation community announced the LibreOffice Math Guide 7.0. Many thanks to Rafael Lima, Jean H. Weber, Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen for their work on this!

• LibreOffice 7.1 is due to be released in early February, and our QA team is already running Bug Hunting Sessions. We’ll have more in the run-up to 7.1 – so to ensure that it’s a rock-solid release, give them a hand!

• And finally… The joint openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020 took place this month! Hundreds of people attended talks, presentations and workshops, so we’re really grateful to everyone who took part. And now we’ve put some of the videos online – see here for the playlist. There are 21 videos so far, but we plan to add more (and upload to PeerTube as well).

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better for everyone!