TDF Community Blog

Update about Marketing Activities in 2nd Half of 2017

2017-12-152017-12-14

LibreOffice has turned seven on September 28, 2017. When we launched our first press release on September 28, 2010, our entire mailing list was quite small: 200 recipients gathered from different sources with journalists and media contacts from all over the world.

During these seven years, my main task has been media relations. One of the most important objectives has been the improvement of the mailing lists, both in terms of quantity and quality.

Today, after seven years, the size of the database has changed dramatically, as we have almost 19,000 email address in our mailing lists, which are targeted based on country, platform (desktop, iOS, Android, mobile, cloud) and focus (security and reviews). In 2017, we have started to target industry analysts, but this list is far from being complete.

Based on geography, we have 6 global lists (journalists, analysts, teams), 70 lists for Europe, 30 lists for the Americas, 5 lists for Pacific, 21 lists for Africa, 18 lists for Asia Middle East, 17 lists for Asia, and 24 lists for Asia Far East. In addition, around 5,000 records are updated and 2,500 are added each year.

Lists are global by country, plus each country – when possible – has a specific list of people who opened a previous press release. Thanks to this targeted database, we have a hit rate around 30%, twice as much as the global PR industry.

For major announcements, individual emails are sent to friendly journalists with a specific angle. I am connected to over 2,000 journalists via LinkedIn, and I have regular contacts with many of them.

Of course, taking care of mailing lists would not be enough without a monthly average of 50 personal contacts with editors, via email and/or phone, and over 100 answers to specific requests (pictures, statistics, review related questions and other info about TDF and LibreOffice).

Another project I have been working at is the production of basic slide decks on different subjects, which can be used by community members to create their own slide decks for presentations. At the moment I am working at updating the following slide decks: Project History & Background, LibreOffice & Competitive Presentation, Document Standards & Open Document Format, Advantages of ODF vs OOXML, Migration Protocol & Training Protocol, plus Useful Slides for Presentations. I also have less organized slides about Digital Citizenship, or the relationship between Technology and Individual Freedom of Choice.

Community members are warmly invited to send me an email to check if I have something which can help them to add some beef to their presentations. In fact, in some cases I test slide decks – adding new angles and concepts – in front of small audiences, before releasing them “officially” on the wiki.

Looking forward, I plan to bring analyst relations up to speed (as media), and improve community-focused activities, supporting the organization of local events and participate when it makes sense budget wise. I would also like to facilitate NLP (native language projects) involvement in the project, helping the integration of local communities within TDF and fostering their growth when they are small or even completely missing.

LibreOffice Community Smiles #14

2017-12-14

Olivier Hallot, from Rio de Janeiro, smiling during a meeting at FISL in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil)

LibreOffice Community Smiles #13

2017-12-14

Christian “cloph” Lohmaier, TDF release engineer, smiling under the sun in Munich

São Paulo LibreOffice Hack-Doc 2017

2017-12-132017-12-13

Because Documentation Matters

The Instituto de Física Teórica of the State University of São Paulo (UNESP), under Prof. Dr. Marcelo Yamashita’s administration, hosted the Brazilian LibreOffice documentation community, which is committed to achieving a final sprint for the review and publication of the Getting Started Guide 5.2.

Eight members of the community gathered together in an effort to review the translation and check the consistency of the contents for final publication. Once the initial introductions were done, each member of the team picked two or three chapters and started work.

This is lengthy work that requires attention, and the team committed to reach the goal in the timeframe that was set. In meetings of this kind, doubts and questions about content are debated immediately. As an additional benefit, the text was improved while some of the user interface terms were corrected and improved for better accuracy, since the team had direct access to the translation server for immediate fixes.

On the second day, by invitation of the documentation team, Vanderlei Junior (a professional content designer) taught the team some techniques needed to produce instructional content – especially videos and interactive media. Vanderlei emphasised the absolute need to plan contents and speeches, and offered important information on framing and timings for instructional videos. He highlighted the fact that video capture is less important than careful definition of content, which, if it’s lacking, will lead to failures.

From Left to right: Raul Pacheco, Olivier Hallot, Vera Cavalcante, Vanderlei Júnior, Túlio Macedo, Valdir Barbosa, Chrystina Pelizer and Fabio Coelho.

On the third day, with all chapters revised and ready for compilation into a book – thus with the goal achieved – the team had a crash course on the Pootle server used for translations of the Help and the user interface of LibreOffice. They also learned about The Document Foundation and its operation, sharing experiences of the older members.

“To participate in the São Paulo Hack-doc was a rich experience for me” said Valdir Barbosa, a TDF-certified instructor and team coordinator for UNESP. “I could discuss several issues related to my job, while discussing new techniques for document production and less known resources of LibreOffice. Besides, it is also exciting to be able to improve the software, with direct access to the development tools” said Valdir.

“It was an excellent opportunity to see some members of the documentation team, as well as meet old documentation friends” said Vera Cavalcante, a community member and LibreOffice Magazine editor. “As I did the previous book compilation, I’ll use my experience to do this one very quickly. I believe it is essential to have periodic meetings for documentation tasks. The Hack-Doc idea worked very well and, for sure, we produced a lot in a short period of time”, she said.

The meeting, originally set for a review sprint, also triggered some discussions on community activities and planning for 2018. The team set a target to define in 2018 a LibreOffice curriculum with multimedia resources for users at several difficulty levels. Also, we discussed the current process of book production – and it is clear that direct translation of the contents for each release is not optimal, and a better approach is to update contents from the release notes, directly in Portuguese. The guide and the multimedia contents will come side-by-side, in complimentary form. Regarding events for 2018, the team will do its best to create a national or Latin American LibreOffice-exclusive event.

Wherever you are in the world, you can join our documentation community – just click this link!