TDF Community Blog

The First LibreOffice Asia Conference Will Be Held On May 25-26, 2019 In Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan

This is the first ever LibreOffice conference covering Asia, a rapidly-growing area for free and open source software. The call for papers will be launched soon.

Berlin, February 18, 2019 – After the huge success of the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in 2018, members of the Asian communities have decided to raise the bar in 2019 with the first ever LibreOffice Asia Conference in Nihonbashi – the very center of Tokyo, Japan – on May 25-26.

One of the main organizers, Naruhiko Ogasawara, a member of the Japanese LibreOffice community and The Document Foundation, can’t hide his excitement: “When we launched the LibreOffice Mini Conference Japan in 2013 as a local event, we knew little about communities in other parts of Asia. In recent years we have attended the LibreOffice Conference and other Asian events like OpenSUSE Asia, COSCUP etc. We have realized that many of our colleagues are active and that our community should learn a lot from them. We are proud to be able to hold the first Asia Conference with our colleagues to further strengthen that partnership.”

“It’s a real leap of faith,” says Franklin Weng, an Asian member in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. “Asia is a rapidly-growing area in adoptions of ODF and LibreOffice, but our ecosystem for LibreOffice and FOSS has not been good enough yet. In this conference we’re not only trying to make the FOSS ecosystem in Asia more healthy, but also to encourage Asian community members to show their potential.”

Several core members from The Document Foundation will attend this conference, including Italo Vignoli, leader of the marketing and public relations community (and co-chairman of LibreOffice Certification Committee), along with Lothar Becker, who is also co-chairman of the Certification Committee. In addition, there will be community members from Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and probably China attending.

The main focus areas of this conference include:

• Business workshop – which will be hosted by Lothar Becker and Italo Vignoli. Lothar and Italo will discuss business services: what are the fundamentals of LibreOffice business services, the current status of LibreOffice business in Europe, Asia and other geographies, and how we can support each other, etc.
• CJK Hackfest – which will be led by Mark Hung, a LibreOffice Certified Developer in Taiwan, to discuss and hack CJK issues in LibreOffice.
• Certification Interview – the second LibreOffice Certification Interview in Asia will be held during the LibreOffice Asia Conference, hosted by Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker. So far total four or five candidates will be interviewed for LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals and LibreOffice Certified Trainers.
• Asia Local Certification for LibreOffice – which will be hosted by Franklin Weng and Eric Sun, two TDF members from Taiwan, to introduce the concept of having LibreOffice skills and trainer certifications in Asia.

The call for proposals will be launched soon in February. Besides the topics above, other LibreOffice and ODF-related topics are also welcome.