Berlin, Juli 1st, 2015 – Registration for the LibreOffice Conference, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from September 23 to September 25, 2015, is now open at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/registration/.
Call for Papers is still open until July 15, 2015. Details on the tracks and the call for papers are available at: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/call-for-papers/. Tracks are about Development, Quality Assurance, Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects, Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility, Migrations and Deployments, Certifications and Best Practices, ODF, Document Liberation and Interoperability, and Building a Business around LibreOffice.
Of course, do not forget to pay a visit to the sponsors who have made the event possible with their generous support: CIB, Collabora, Google, Magenta and RedHat (http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/our-sponsors/).
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. In my capacity as Executive Director, I mostly shed a light on the administrative bits of the foundation running, and my staff colleagues will give an overview on their respective areas of working later on.
One of the most noteworthy things for sure is the publication of our annual report, which for the first time since TDF’s existance has been published in English and in German at the same time, a model we want to follow also for the upcoming years. The English version has been polished up by a designer, and will also serve as printed brochure for upcoming events and meetings.
Likewise, we have begun publishing the accounting ledgers to the general public, to give you an overview on how we spend donors money and what projects we invest in. Accompanied by that is the publication of the board reports on the various area of our project.
Staff-wise, I am very happy that since spring of 2015, Italo Vignoli has been contracted by TDF for marketing and PR, a role he has been filling on a volunteer basis for some time already. Supported by a future marketing intern, Italo will work on press releases in joint cooperation with the community, regular marketing calls and a TDF merchandising online store.
A lot of other projects have been prepared behind the scenes, like our tenders on MozTrap and on LibreOffice UX, where we’re working hard on making them a success just like last year’s Android tender.
Community-Meeting in Essen
On the foundation side, we now have 204 members and even more contributors around the globe. Being a Bavarian, one thing that makes me particulary proud is of course that we welcomed the city of Munich in our Advisory Board early this year.
One of my personal tasks for the rest of the year is to engage stronger again in my native language community. We recently had an exciting community meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, where we also had a chance to exchange thoughts and views with the Italian community, represented by Italo Vignoli. The German community has traditionally been a strong one, so 18 people in total found their way to the meeting. With the setup of regular German community phone conferences, including one dedicated call for the marketing of LibreOffice 5.0, we will work on getting more contributors in and engage in local marketing of LibreOffice – the best free office suite and one incredibly exciting community!
Berlin, June 30, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.4.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family, with over 70 fixes over LibreOffice 4.4.3. New features introduced by LibreOffice 4.4 are listed on this wiki page: .
The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations with the backingof professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/).
Get involved: LibreOffice 5.0 and LibreOffice Conference
The LibreOffice community is actively working at next major release, LibreOffice 5.0, expected in early August 2015. After two successful bug hunting sessions, developers are putting the finishing touches to the software. Preliminary release notes are available at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.0.
Also, the Call for Paper for LibreOffice Conference 2015, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from September 23 to September 25, is open until July 15, with further details on the website: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/call-for-papers/.
The LibreOffice community is growing, and these are exceptional opportunities to join the fun together with over 900 developers who have contributed to the code and over 3,000 volunteers who have localized the suite, chased the bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences, and advocated LibreOffice both at global and local levels.
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.
TDF is grateful to all donors and volunteers for the ongoing donations, support and contributions, which make TDF what it is today and contribute greatly to the ongoing success of the LibreOffice community!
LibreOffice Design Team launches a competition to increase the number of Impress templates bundled with the upcoming Libreoffice 5.0, due in early August 2015. The competition is open to designers, artists and creatively talented users.
The project is focused on Impress templates, as this is the primary place where templates are needed. As Impress templates do not contain text, they can be included in all language versions without the need of translation.
Deadline for submission of new Templates is July 18, 2015, to be included in LibreOffice 5.0. Works submitted after this deadline will be added to the next LibreOffice release.
Templates will be selected by the members of the LibreOffice Design Team, and may be edited before the inclusion. Authors will be credited on http://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/credits/.
To be considered for inclusion, templates must meet the following conditions:
They are an original work, and are not converted from existing templates.
They are licensed under Creative Commons CC0.
They are templates for LibreOffice Impress and contain two or more master slides.
They are based only on fonts bundled with LibreOffice (Caladea, Carlito, DejaVu, Gentium, Liberation, Libertine G, Open Sans, PT Serif, Source Code, Source Sans).
They contain no text, including no text in images, as they are intended to be used in any language without the need for translation.
They are based on LibreOffice styles, and not on direct element formatting. Styles must be created according to the expected use of the template.
Berlin, June 9, 2015 – The LibreOffice community is getting ready for the next major release – planned for late July or early August – with a second bug hunting session focused on new features, including Windows 10 compatibility, and fixes for bugs and regressions. The session will last 3 full days, from June 19 to June 21, 2015, and check the first release candidate of LibreOffice 5.0.
On those dates, mentors will be available from 08AM UTC to 10PM UTC to help less experienced volunteers to triage bugs, on the QA IRC channel and via email on the QA mailing list.
Those who cannot join during the bug hunting session are always welcome to help chasing bugs and regressions when they have time.
