The Japanese community has just organized their LibreOffice mini Conference 2016 in Osaka. We have asked Takeshi Abe, a leading member of the Japanese community, a few questions about the event.
Can you tell us more about the context of the Japan LibreOffice Mini-Conference?
In 2012, the idea of a mini Conference in Japan has emerged from discussions in LibreOffice Japanese Team, in charge of the organization of the series of events. Our team consists of the most active contributors in the Japanese community, serving as a NLP (native language project) now.
To explain the situation, let’s summarize the history of the Japanese community since the OOo era (please note that this is based on
my personal opinions). OOo had earned huge expectations from Japanese users. It was obvious both from the number of migrations [1] in the country, and the fact that a government agency was leading a technical research project for specific features of Japanese Language [2].
Unfortunately, like other communities in the OOo project, Japanese volunteers suffered from the bureaucratic nature of the project. Core members of the NLP faced difficulty to focus on contribution. They eventually parted ways, and some of them formed the so-called “users group” [3] in 2002, to try to manage the situation better than the “official” NLP. The dispute seems to remain unresolved until today.
This kind of separation resulted in fewer collaboration between volunteers and in a poor communication within the community. Worse, even, user and business organizations became skeptical about the availability of skilled people who could help to send the right feedback to the project. This resulted in even fewer contributions over time.
Time passed and the launch of LibreOffice struck. Its manifesto sounded exactly essential to us. Sure, meritocracy is the key. Early members of the LibreOffice Japanese Team have chosen a flat structure with no lead. Our team has encouraged each one to do what he/she could do in his/her favorite manner. It worked magically, and it still works today.
We have a practical issu, though: how can we communicate effectively outside the project to promote LibreOffice, recruit new volunteers or exchange ideas with the industry, when we have neither the authority nor a structured organization?
One of the answers was quite simple: let’s gather and ask people who are interested. This is how the mini Conference was born.
Is LibreOffice known in Japan and are there known deployments in the public or private sector?
Yes. You can find visible deployments at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/JA/Marketing/CaseStudy.
Last question: do you have any specific goal for this mini-conference that would make you and the Japanese community happy?
Yes. We gather people annually to unify the community. Also, our Japanese Team has the time to have a face-to-face off-line meeting.
The last mini Conference was held in late 2014, focused on code development from the Japanese community. It was not only a success with interesting presentations by young hackers, but also provided a tutorial for newbies about how to start hacking LibreOffice.
This time we plan to meet people with broader interests. We have called for both long and short form of presentations on whatever,
whoever in the community would like to share. Accepted papers include ones from users, volunteers, academia and companies providing value-added service.
In addition, we have Kohei Yoshida as our guest speaker, talking about “five years of LibreOffice”.
I am sure that meeting friends in the community in early January and enjoying the refreshingly cold air in Osaka will be a great start for the activities in 2016.
[1] http://ossforum.jp/jossfiles/OpenOffice.org_use_cases_0.pdf
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070506220203/http://www.ipa.go.jp/software/open/ossc/2007/theme/koubo1_t01.html
[3] http://oooug.jp/
