Job Search for a Development Mentor (#201711-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks an individual – or individuals part (or full) time – to be

a Development Mentor

to start work as soon as possible. The role requires the following:

  • Self-starting, remote working experience
  • Experience contributing to FLOSS communities
  • Excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring
  • Coding experience (LibreOffice coding preferred)
  • Willingness to travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally

The role involves working from home at your location for at least 20 hours per week, up to full-time and includes among other items:

Supporting existing mentors in the LibreOffice community including:

  • Building relationships between existing mentors and new contributors
  • Identifying and on-boarding new contributors
  • Affirming and encouraging their contribution
  • Building initial relationships with them
  • Encouraging them to join IRC to meet the teams
  • Introducing them to domain experts for deeper learning
  • Helping to educate new contributors by
  • Positively reviewing their code contributions
  • Introducing them to our tooling and culture
  • Attracting new contributors by promoting the project
  • Interaction with UX volunteers

Previous experience with such tasks is highly welcome, so is using free software. Speaking and writing English reasonably well 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, which usually take place at 14:00 or 15:00 UTC once per week).

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, 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 Florian Effenberger at floeff@documentfoundation.org no later than December 5, 2017. You can encrypt your message via PGP/GnuPG.

If you haven’t received feedback by January 11, 2018, your application could not be considered.

Event reports: LibreOffice in Cyprus and Czech Republic

Throughout the year, LibreOffice community members attend events around the world, helping to promote free software and open standards. We’re really grateful for their work! Today we have a couple of reports from recent events – and we start with Muhammet Kara who has been busy in Cyprus:

I attended the Free Software and Linux Seminar on October 20 at METU NCC (Northern Cyprus Campus). 60 people were there, all university students, and I talked about many topics: free Software, Linux, LibreOffice, ways to contribute, and opportunities like Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, and LibreLadies. Then I finished by answering their questions about Free Software, Linux, and Pardus. The excitement of the attendees was promising!

Then, on October 21 at METU NCC, I helped to organise a LibreOffice Developer Workshop. Many people were interested in joining this session, but I asked the organisers to bring a small group, so 10+ people attended. We formed a Telegram group with the attendees so that they can cooperate, and I can provide some hand-holding while they got their first patches merged. (So far two of them have had their patches submitted, reviewed, and ready to be merged. The first ones will also help the others to follow.) Overall, I am happy about the results.

LinuxDays 2017 in Prague

Next up, we have a report from Stanislav Horáček about a recent event in the Czech Republic:

Zdeněk Crhonek and I attended LinuxDays, the biggest Linux event in the Czech Republic. A simple LibreOffice booth was managed there – here’s what it looked like (photo by Lukáš Jelínek):

We got useful feedback, and most of our visitors were satisfied with LibreOffice – there were fewer complaints about document compatibility than in previous years. In addition, there was interest in how development works and the role of The Document Foundation. We were surprised by some very specific questions (headless mode, Base, remote documents…) and it’s clear that LibreOffice Online is still generally not well known.

There was also a meeting of Czech localisation communities (Mozilla, GNOME, OpenSUSE) – we agreed to continue with cooperation (terminology and style consolidation, and an initiative to renew language dictionaries). Overall, I have a feeling that the Linux/FOSS community here is strong and growing, and it is great that LibreOffice can be part of it.

Thanks to Muhammet and Stanislav for their great work! We really appreciate your help spreading the word. And to others reading this: if you want to get involved as well and promote LibreOffice in your country, join our marketing mailing list and we’ll give you a hand!

LibreOffice 5.3.7 available for download

Berlin, November 2, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.3.7, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 5.3 family, targeted at enterprises, government bodies and individual users in production environments.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice in production environments with the backing of professional support by certified developers, migrators and trainers (a list is available at: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.3.7 includes around fifty bug fixes. Technical details can be found here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.7/RC1 and here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.3.7/RC2.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.3.7 is immediately available for download from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Donations help TDF to maintain its infrastructure, share knowledge, and organise events such as the Month of LibreOffice, which has started yesterday and will be active until the end of November (https://blog.documentfoundation.org/).

Several companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) provide either value-added LTS versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

The November 2017 Month of LibreOffice begins!

Six months ago we ran a Month of LibreOffice, crediting contributions all across the project – from development and documentation through to QA and translations. And today we’re starting another one! If you use LibreOffice and want to help improve it, you can join our community and get a shiny sticker for your PC, laptop or other kit:

(And if you already have one from the last Month of LibreOffice, now’s you chance to get another!) Over the next four weeks, we’ll be keeping track of contributions to the project, and add your name to this wiki page if you help out. The page will be updated daily, and everyone listed there can claim a sticker! Read on to find out how you can get involved…

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

  • Help to confirm bugs: 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 5.4.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Contribute 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. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!
  • Translate the 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.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! 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 a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

So there’s plenty to do! Dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Twitter account over the next four weeks!

Call for Papers Open Document Editors DevRoom at FOSDEM 2018

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each year in Brussels (Belgium) at the ULB Campus Solbosch. In 2018, it will be held on Saturday, February 3, and Sunday, February 4.

As usual, the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be jointly organized by Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, on Saturday, February 3 (from 10:30AM to 6:30PM, room AW1.120). The shared devroom gives every project in this area a chance to present ODF related developments and innovations.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Open Document Editors or the ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, extensions, tools and adoption related cases. This is a unique opportunity to show new ideas and developments to a wide technical audience. Please do keep in mind, though, that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

Length of talks should be limited to a maximum of 30 minutes, as we would like to have questions after each presentation and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

All submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM18.

While filing your proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored at Pentabarf).

To submit your talk, click on “Create Event”, then make sure to select the “Open Document Editors” devroom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please contact ode-devroom-manager@fosdem.org.

The deadline is Monday, December 4th, 2017. Accepted speakers will be notified by Monday, December 11th, 2017. The schedule will be published by Friday, December 15, 2017.

Recording Permission

The talks in the Open Document Editors DevRoom will be audio and video recorded, and possibly streamed live too.

In the “Submission notes” field, please indicate that you agree to have your presentation recorded and published under the same license as all FOSDEM content (CC-BY). For example: “If my speech is accepted for FOSDEM, I hereby agree to be recorded and to have recordings – including slides and other presentation-related documents – published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License. Sincerely, Name”.