The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world’s leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. It’s comprised of a team of highly skilled and motivated people, working on infrastructure, design, documentation, QA, marketing and other tasks. We’re passionate about free software and bringing people into our community.
To grow our volunteer community, in particular for code contributions, we’re searching for
a Development Mentor (m/f/d)
to start work as soon as possible. If you’re interested in the role, which is offered on a part- or full-time basis, you ideally have:
previous experience in remote work
been a long-time contributor to one or more FLOSS communities
excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring – a fluent command of the English language (written and spoken) is expected
coding experience in several FLOSS code bases and programming languages, including LibreOffice
demonstrable C++ coding experience of at least five years, plus active knowledge of at least one more language used in LibreOffice (e.g. Python or Java)
willingness to regularly travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally
self-driven and a good team player; interested in working together with our team
The remote job role involves working from home at your location and includes among other items:
Work with our existing team in the LibreOffice community on topics including:
building relationships between the community and new contributors
identifying and on-boarding new contributors
affirming and encouraging their contribution
encouraging them to join IRC and other communication channels to meet the community
building relationships with domain experts for deeper learning
attracting new contributors by promoting the project
interaction with UX volunteers
Shape and create development mentoring including:
helping to onboard new contributors by
positively reviewing their code contributions
improving their C++ programming skills & design, and coding style
introducing them to our tooling and culture
designing, and define easy tasks for new contributors
maintaining our technical documentation, e.g.
developer guide
wiki articles
code comments
helping to review the results of development tenders produced by TDF
goals-oriented and with a laser-sharp focus to grow excellent LibreOffice core contributors, our perfect candidate will come up with creative ways to find and attract volunteers
Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software. 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).
TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, gender, 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.
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 tender20200701@documentfoundation.orgno later than September 15, 2020.
If you haven’t received feedback by October 30, 2020, your application could not be considered.
From the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice:
Dear fellow Community members,
Time has now come to decide how to proceed with some of the proposed changes taken from the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 with the regards of the 7.0 release, due in some weeks.
We really appreciated ideas and thoughts coming from our Community and we want to thank everyone who actively participated in the discussion, providing different points of views and sharing different scenarios, and proving themselves as passionate and caring members of the Community. Many contributions found on the board-discuss mailing list and/or via other channels are thoughtful, interesting and worthy of a much more profound discussion, in the common effort to overcome the challenge we have at hand: providing even better sustainability to the Project and its Community.
All those ideas, objections and insights will require more time to digest, merge and distill than the short time that separates us from the 7.0 release, the major release for the 10th anniversary of our beloved project, LibreOffice.
As such, the Board of Directors decided that the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 has to undergo further investigations and refinements, that we hope to carry on with the support of Community members, with the goal of implementing in a future release some clear, discussed and agreed changes on branding and Marketing that will help improving the sustainability of the project without lessening or hindering the role of LibreOffice and its Community inside the free software panorama.
Because of the importance of the topic at hand and the need of a worthy and compelling discussion with the Community, we will provide a time plan in a few days as well as some guidelines, with the goal of streamlining the process and coming to some good conclusions in a quick and effective way.
As such, the 7.0 release of LibreOffice will not see any of the tagline/flavor text proposed inside the release candidate (RC) versions, the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 or any of the alternatives proposed during the discussion, specifically inside the splash-screen, the start center and the about box; to explain it with other words, the modifications put in the RC versions with the regards of branding will be reverted to a previous state, so there will be seamless continuity from the 6.4 version to the 7.0.
As stated before, none of the changes being evaluated will affect the license, the availability, the permitted uses and/or the functionality. LibreOffice will always be free software and nothing is changing for end users, developers and Community members.
Yet again, we renew our encouragement to contribute actively in the discussion about the Marketing/Communication Plan for 2020-2025 in the next weeks, to allow for a more effective branding/Marketing ideas for the LibreOffice product and sustainability of its Community.
LibreOffice is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you, our worldwide amazing Community and all of its members, no matter their profession or background. Thank you truly, to all of you, for the passion, energy and creativity you put into this joint and thriving project. We’re looking forward to the next ten years to come!
Yesterday, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic LibreOffice Community gathered for the third consecutive month, with panelists who covered different topics related to the office suite.
The event was broadcast live on YouTube. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for just over 6 hours and featured speakers from 6 nationalities, recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.
Italo Vignoli, from Italy, one of the founding members of TDF provided a complete overview of the Open Document Format.
Olivier Hallot, from Brazil, another of the founding members presented different Translation Tools.
Rafael Espinar, from Spain, spoke with Antonio Caba and Francisco Rueda about the impact of migration.
Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, presented Migration at the University of Costa Rica.
Paul Janzen, from Paraguay, gave a talk on the Migration Experiences of the Philadelphia School in Paraguay.
Ameck Bozo, from Venezuela, gave a detailed tour of the creation of a Dashboard in Calc.
José Gatica, from Chile, presented the Migration of a vulnerable school.
Klaibson Ribeiro, from Brazil, presented LibreOffice Online.
Gustavo Pacheco, also from Brazil, spoke about the importance of participating as a member of TDF.
This was, of course, an open event – free and aimed at anyone interested in learning more about LibreOffice. Also, we thank our friend Servio from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live broadcast through YouTube. All the talks are available in the LibreOffice Hispano channel – here’s a playlist:
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Twenty years ago, on July 19, 2000, Sun Microsystems announced at O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California, the release of the source code of its StarOffice Suite to the open source community. Thus began the history of the community that helped grow the OpenOffice project for nearly ten years, until the announcement of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
In September 2010, the same community created The Document Foundation – an organization promised by Sun’s press release, which was always postponed for some reason – to drive the LibreOffice project forward, and continue the story of the best open source office suite while remaining true to the original copyleft license.
Today, we are celebrating 20 years of activity, while preparing for the announcement of LibreOffice 7.0, which will be the first to support Open Document Format 1.3. The passion that we continue to put into all the things we do, including discussions about the future of LibreOffice, is a testament to a daily commitment that has never waned in the last 20 years, and will remain unchanged in the next 20.
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
Ongoing Marketing Activities
Marketing at The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is a large team effort, with contractors paid for their activity – thanks to the money made available by our generous donors – and several volunteers, carrying out actions both at global and local levels to increase visibility and brand awareness.
One of the main ongoing projects has been the improvement of the donation page, with several test of page design and wording and of suggested donation amounts. In addition, statistics have been monitored on a daily basis, to trigger a quick reaction to negative fluctuations. As a result, the unexpected low number of donations in February 2019 was counterbalanced by the positive numbers of the following months.
Another ongoing project has been the Community Member Monday Series, with a weekly interview to one or more community members about their contributions to the project, especially within their native language community. Looking at the interviews, it’s rather easy to realize how diverse and geographically spread are the contributors to the LibreOffice project.
The marketing team created a series of New Features videos for the announcement of LibreOffice 6.3 and LibreOffice 6.4, covering the suite as a whole and Writer, Calc and Impress in detail. These videos are a great way to demonstrate new features to end users and are often embedded by news websites. They have also been translated in different languages by volunteers of the localization community. Here’s the 6.3 video:
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And 6.4:
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Activities Month by Month
In January, digital currencies support for donations – which was limited to Bitcoin – was extended via CoinGate to other currencies, including: Litecoin, Ethereum, Dash, Nano, Telcoin, Zcash, XRP (Ripple), Augur, Stellar and Decred.
In late January, many LibreOffice contributors and the entire team at The Document Foundation travelled to Brussels for internal meetings and a hackfest, and then to attend FOSDEM, the largest FOSS meeting in Europe, at Université Libre de Bruxelles.
During FOSDEM, we had the opportunity to meet LibreOffice advocates in front of our booth in the main hall of building K where most of the largest projects are based, and at the Open Document Editors devroom. We also had a social dinner at ICAB, where the Italian community cooked pasta for our guests from various FOSS communities.
In early February, we announced LibreOffice 6.2, focusing on social media outreach to support the distribution of the usual announcement in several languages to global media lists. We followed the evolution of journalists, who are increasingly looking at social media as a source of news.
In February we also announced the dates of the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria (Spain) and those of the First LibreOffice Asia Conference in Tokyo.
In March, we started working on TDF’s Annual Report, creating most of the content and illustrations with LibreOffice, and collecting images from community events for the final version. The final booklet is entirely produced with free software (LibreOffice plus GIMP for tweaking images, Scribus for creating the layout, and the free Croscore fonts: Carlito and Caladea).
On March 15, MITRE announced that The Document Foundation was approved as CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) is a reference list of public cybersecurity vulnerabilities, with entries that describe those vulnerabilities and provide references for them.
During the month, we also announced the start of Google Summer of Code activities, we launched the call for papers for LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria (Spain), and we celebrated the Document Freedom Day. Finally, we started posting regular updates on Mastodon, an open source, self-hosted and federated social media platform.
In April, we announced the first Latin America LibreOffice Conference at the Facultad Politécnica de la Universidad Nactional de Assunción (FPUNA) in Asunción, Paraguay, on July 19 and 20.
In May, Mike Saunders organized the “Month of LibreOffice” campaign, which gave contributors the opportunity to thank other members of the community for their work by awarding them stickers and mugs. There have been awesome contributions all across the project, from code patches and bug report confirmations, through to translations and user support, with the award of 355 stickers and 12 glass mugs.
Members of the German LibreOffice community met at Linux Hotel in Essen for a weekend of discussions, ideas, hacking – and great food! The project also announced Adfinis SyGroup as a new member of TDF Advisory Board, and LibreOffice participating in Google Season of Docs to give technical writers and FOSS projects an opportunity to co-operate and better know each other.
In June, we started to concentrate on the announcement of LibreOffice 6.3, cleaning journalist mailings and starting to collect information for the press pack. Over time, we have also increased TDF and LibreOffice presence on social media, by incrementing the number of tweets and posts.
Meanwhile, we announced a cool new website, What Can I Do For LibreOffice, which shows people several ways to contribute to our project and community in a friendly and appealing way, encouraging newcomers to jump on board.
In July, we announced COSM, the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers, to hold funds and to retain editors to work at the ODF Technical Committee, to accelerate the development of ODF 1.3. ODF (Open Document Format) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open standard document format, ideal for long-term content storage and sharing.
We also finalized the launch materials for LibreOffice 6.3, with the press kit localized in several languages, thanks to volunteers who contributed the translation in their own language, and the slide deck for press briefings.
At the end of the month, TDF announced that the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has joined the project’s Advisory Board. Back in 2014, the UK Cabinet Office announced the selection of the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing and viewing government documents, so they are one of the main advocates of the standard.
In August, we announced LibreOffice 6.3, with better performance, many new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats. In Europe, members of the German LibreOffice community attended FrOSCon, one of the largest FOSS events in the country.
We started a new marketing campaign highlighting the fact that LibreOffice has no forced registration, subscriptions, payments or vendor lock-in, to underline the difference with the increasing number of software vendors asking for online subscription models.
In September, the community attended the LibreOffice Conference organized by the Spanish community at the University of Almeria, with sessions about development and other topics, and several workshops and meetings. Additional events, like the welcome drinks, the social dinner and the hacknight were hosted in different locations.
In October, The Document Foundation supported the International Day Against DRM 2019, to fight against the technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. Later in the month we started the announcement process for LibreOffice 6.4 with the first Bug Hunting Session.
In November, the TC Committee Draft of ODF Version 1.3 was released to OASIS for ratification. At the end of the review process, ODF Version 1.3 will be submitted to ISO for the final approval, which is expected in late 2020 or early 2021. During the month, LibreOffice was also present at two events in the Czech Republic, LinuxDays in Prague and OpenAlt in Brno. Of course, November was another “Month of LibreOffice”, with Mike Saunders awarding 304 stickers and 10 glass mugs to top contributors.
In December we announced the winner of the LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest. The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). To celebrate, we have a special logo for presentations, events and swag.
The Importance of Donations
Donations are key for current operations and future developments of The Document Foundation, as they allow to keep the organization alive, to fund specific activities, to support events and other marketing tasks organized by native language projects, and to maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice.
Donations are also used to fund local projects such as OSCAL in Albania, LibreOffice Conferences in Asia and Latin America, LibreItalia Conference in Italy, FOSS events in Czech Republic, hackfests in France, activities targeted to schools in Italy, local events in the US, Japan and Turkey, and much more.
In addition, funds from donations have been used to reimburse travel expenses for many community members who have attended events to present LibreOffice and share their knowledge about the project.
If you find LibreOffice useful, support us with a donation so that we can continue to build our community, share knowledge, and improve LibreOffice for everyone!
The Czech translation of the LibreOffice 6.4 Getting Started guide is now available! The history behind this book is quite long: first, another team translated the version 4.2 guide in 2014, but they never fully finished it (didn’t do corrections, publishing etc.) Then they started to update for version 5.1, but never finished the translation. I was not part of the team in these days, so this is what I’ve found out from the mailing lists. Thanks to the CAT (computer-assisted translation) tool OmegaT, we could used their old translations and build upon it. In 2020 we started translation again with version 6.0, but we quickly jumped to version 6.4 and followed the documentation team’s updates.
The translation was a team effort – a big thanks to:
Anna Benc
Eliška Rolfová
Lucie Studená
Marcela Tomešová
Miloš Šrámek
Petr Kuběj
Petr Valach
Roman Toman
Vendula Crhonková
Zdeněk Crhonek
Zuzana Kašparová
Zuzana Pitříková
Great work! Everyone is welcome to join our documentation community. It’s a great way to build up skills for a potential future career in technical writing…
Twenty years ago, on July 19, 2000, Sun Microsystems announced at O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Monterey, California, the release of the source code of its StarOffice Suite to the open source community. Thus began the history of the community that helped grow the OpenOffice project for nearly ten years, until the announcement of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
