The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks a

Development Mentoring Lead

to start work as soon as possible. The role, which is scheduled for 20 hours a week, includes amongst other items:

• Helping new contributors to get started with LibreOffice code including:
  • building LibreOffice
  • getting started with patch submittal on gerrit
  • patrol bugzilla, github and mailing lists for patches uploaded there and help author to upload to gerrit proper
  • clarifying beginner tasks (Easy Hacks) and connecting beginners with domain experts
  • manage, update and watch the list of beginner tasks
  • select attractive beginner tasks and promote, share and advertise those
  • together with other TDF staff, manage quick access to TDF cloud resources for developers (see: Anytime Builder VMs for Developers and Using a VM)
  • Talking to people
    • make the first time contributors feel they are awesome
    • get them to IRC ASAP
    • watch them, ping them, ask them what’s the next thing they want to
    • work on, help them to choose if they are unsure
• ensure changes are not lingering too long (2 weeks) on gerrit unreviewed by reviewing them or finding someone to review them
• organizing, announcing and leading regular events for onboarding beginners (virtual Hackfests)
• updating, steamlining and maintaining developer documentation
• broadening developer resources with podcasts or screencasts for newcomers
• reporting and blogging about interesting developments on LibreOffice code to attract new contributors
• regularly check back with the existing volunteer developer base:
  • to identify and clear out stumbling blocks
  • to learn about reasons why volunteers move on
• encourage contributors with basic experience to move on from EasyHacks to more challenging and interesting tasks
• coordinate with QA, design and other groups in the LibreOffice community
• put outstanding volunteer contributions into the limelight
• take part in weekly Engineering Steering Committee meetings
• reach out to other OSS communities (desktop environments, programming languages and frameworks, databases, IDEs etc.)

by Florian Effenberger, Executive Director of TDF

Florian Effenberger

With the second quarter being over, the longest day of the year having passed by, and summer vacation time coming up for many of us, it’s time to look back what happened at TDF the first six months of the year. With many projects, activities and developments going on, time has passed by once again at lightning speed, and I want to highlight a few of the things that happened, enabled by our invaluable volunteer contributions, our generous donors, and our wonderful and amazing community, end-users and adopters.…

TDF has begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public. As part of the foundation’s transparency and openness principles, TDF is committed to publishing the accounting ledgers on a regular basis from now on.

Accounting is done by a professional accountant, and the resulting ledgers are slightly anonymized and translated. The style of the ledgers is defined by our tax/accounting requirements and changes are possible only on a limited basis.…