TDF Community Blog

We’re 17 days into the Month of LibreOffice, May 2017 – and we’ve just gone over the 200 stickers mark. Yes, that’s 200 community members who’ve helped out with code, QA, translations, documentation, user support and marketing – and each one will receive a cool sticker for their laptops and other kit. Thanks everyone for your help!

Also, the printed stickers arrived at The Document Foundation today:

There are still two more weeks of the Month of LibreOffice to go – so don’t miss out on a sticker! Read on to find out how you can help the project (and millions of LibreOffice users around the world), and claim a sticker for yourself:

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 5.3.2”. (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!)

To help spread the word about LibreOffice and get feedback from users (and contributors), The Document Foundation operates various social media accounts. Some of these have been running since the start of the project – while others are relatively new. We’ve been collecting statistics about our social media accounts for a while, so let’s share them with the world.

Twitter

Our Twitter account is used mainly for announcements, links to blog posts and videos, and retweeting interesting messages from LibreOffice users. We sometimes get questions as well, although it’s hard to provide long answers in 140 characters, so we often point users at Ask LibreOffice instead. Here’s our follower count in recent months:

Facebook

Meanwhile, our English-language Facebook page is getting busier, and via it we receive lots of messages of support (along with requests for new features). The audience tends to be made up of end-users rather than developers, although we encourage people to get involved with non-coding tasks such as translations, testing and documentation. This graph shows the growth in page likes over the last 11 months:

Google+

We also have a Google+ page, which isn’t as busy as Facebook, but our followers there tend to be more technical – so it’s a great place to bring in potential contributors. In terms of followers, the growth here over the last 11 months hasn’t been huge, but there’s steady progress:

YouTube

We’ve been tracking the total number of video views on our YouTube channel since November 2016. Due to the new content we’ve been adding, including new features videos, interviews and tutorials in many languages (thanks to our worldwide community), the total view count has shot up:

Others

The LibreOffice community on Reddit is quite small, but we’re posting regular updates and encouraging users to help one another with questions. Then there’s our Telegram group which we launched late last year – this has reached almost 400 members.

Finally, if you think LibreOffice and/or The Document Foundation should be active on some other social media that we’ve not covered in this post, join our marketing community and let us know!