The Document Foundation announces that the Call for Papers for the LibreOffice Conference 2014 is now open. The event will be organized in Bern, Switzerland, from September 3 to 5, at Bern University.
TDF Members and Volunteers are invited to submit their proposals by May 15, 2014, to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program, base on the following tracks:
a) Development, APIs, Extensions
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localization and Native Language Projects
d) Design
e) Accessibility
f) Certification for Migrations and Trainings
g) Enterprise Deployments and Migrations
h) Open Document Format (ODF)
Proposals, including a short bio of the speaker (max 500 characters) as well as a short abstract of the contents (max 1,000 characters), should be sent to the program committee address: conference@libreoffice.org.
Presentations, case studies, workshops and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth, and will last 60 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 20 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.
Whether you are a seasoned presenter, or have never stood up in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice we definitely want to hear from you.
Berlin, February 20, 2014 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.2.1, three weeks after the availability of LibreOffice 4.2. The first minor release – based on a shorter cycle than expected – solves over 100 problems, introduced by the larger than usual code refactoring of the LibreOffice 4.2 family. The changelog is available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.2.1/RC1
“LibreOffice 4.2 was extremely ambitious, in terms of code refactoring. Because of this, we planned an extensive quality assurance cycle, based on automated tests followed by QA sprints in December and January, but we were not able to catch all the issues”, says Thorsten Behrens, Chairman of The Document Foundation. “Based on early adopters feedback, developers and QA experts have jumped in immediately, and have solved the most urgent problems in less than three weeks, showing the importance of our large community.”
LibreOffice 4.2.1 and LibreOffice 4.1.5 will be on stage at CeBIT in Hannover from March 10 to March 14Â (Hall 6, Booth H14). In addition, Florian Effenberger and Italo Vignoli will speak about LibreOffice at the Open Source Conference.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Berlin, February 19, 2014 – The new Board of Directors of The Document Foundation is officially in charge from February 18, 2014, to February 17, 2016.
Elected as members, in order of votes, are: Thorsten Behrens (independent), Eliane Domingos de Sousa (independent), Michael Meeks (Collabora), Fridrich Strba (independent), Adam Fyne (CloudOn), Joel Madero (independent) and Bjoern Michaelsen (Canonical). Elected as deputies, in order of votes, are: Andreas Mantke (independent), Eike Rathke (Red Hat) and Norbert Thiebaud (independent).
During its first meeting, the board has elected Thorsten Behrens as Chairman and Eliane Domingos de Sousa as Deputy Chairman. In addition, Florian Effenberger has been promoted to Executive Director, with the responsibility of helping the Board of Directors to coordinate and control the foundation activities.
“The new board offers a good balance between the old OOo heritage and the new LibreOffice spirit, with several people representing both souls of the project. In addition, has a wider geographical coverage than the previous one, as there are 6 people from Europe, 3 from the Americas and one from Middle East”, says Thorsten Behrens.
As of January 1st, 2014, The Document Foundation has over 190 members and thousands of volunteers worldwide.
The project is supported by companies and organizations who sit on the Advisory Board: AMD, CloudOn, Collabora, Free Software Foundation, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Google, Intel, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), Lanedo, MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for the Open Productivity Suite), Red Hat, Software in the Public Interest (SPI), Studio Storti and SUSE.
Berlin, February 13, 2014 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the LibreOffice Conference 2014 will be jointly organized by the Swiss Open Systems User Group (CH Open, http://www.ch-open.ch) and the Research Center for Digital Sustainability of the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Bern (http://www.iwi.unibe.ch/content/index_eng.html), and hosted by the University of Bern, from September 3 to September 5, 2014.
In addition, on September 2 the LibreOffice community will gather for several face-to-face meetings: Board of Directors, Engineering Steering Committee, and Certification Committee. During the conference week, TDF will also organize the first certification training session for migration and training candidates.
Bern is the federal city of Switzerland and the seat of the parliament, government and administration of the Swiss Confederation, the Canton of Bern and the City of Bern. The old city is a UNESCO world heritage site since 1982.
“Holding the LibreOffice Conference in the city of Bern will definitely improve the awareness of Open Source software in Switzerland, and hopefully trigger the migration process in public administrations which has already started in France, Germany and Italy”, say Nicholas Christener and Matthias StĂŒrmer, leaders of the organization committee.
Support The Document Foundation
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to expand the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
Berlin, February 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.1.5, for Windows, MacOS X and Linux, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.1 family targeted to large deployments in enterprises and public administrations (which should always be supported by TDF certified developers: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/developers/).
Meet the Community
From March 10 to March 14, The Document Foundation will exhibit at CeBIT in Hannover (Hall 6, Booth H14) to showcase LibreOffice 4.2 and LibreOffice 4.1.5. In addition, Florian Effenberger and Italo Vignoli will speak about LibreOffice at the Open Source Conference, of the project infrastructure and of a reference protocol for large migrations.
Support The Document Foundation
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to expand the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level.
2013 has been one of the best years for LibreOffice in Brazil
and it is becoming even better.
The Brazilian community outperformed itself in all kind of activities around LibreOffice and The Document Foundation during 2013. We attended ten events, signed an important agreement and got our first LibreOffice certified developer. It was also time to start looking at our neighbors in Latin America.
Events
We participated in ten events sponsoring activities in LibreOffice. The FLISOL 2013 in Brasilia to invite new developers to join our development. The FSLDC 2013 in Duque de Caxias, promoting LibreOffice to a broad audience of users and developers. The Document Freedom Day 2013 was also coordinated by the Brazilian community in Rio de Janeiro and sponsored by SINDPD-RJ.
FSLDC Duque de CaxiasFLISOL – BrasĂlia: Call for new developers. From left to right: Deivi Kuhn, Henderson Matsuura, Olivier HallotThe Document Freedom Day in Rio de Janeiro. From left to right: Eliane Domingos, Marcelo Soriano and Marcio Monteiro
The Lecture Cycle of SINDPD-RJ regularly talked on LibreOffice new developments on each major release in 2013, accessing a focused set of IT professionals and FOSS advocates. The Santa Catarina State LibreOffice community also had its 2nd LibreOffice Meeting that included a hack day for students interested in starting to contribute code to LibreOffice and the SOLISC (in the same state) also had lectures on LibreOffice, lead by Klaibson Ribeiro.
Then we had our major event, FISL 14 in July 2013, where we brought Italo Vignoli, Bjoern Michaelsen and Olivier Hallot of The Document Foundation Board of Directors to lecture on LibreOffice migrations, LibreOffice community engagements and LibreOffice development. At the same event the State of Rio Grande do Sul and The Docuemnt Foundation agreed to partner for the deployment of Open Document Formats and LibreOffice within the State public administration, aiming a few hundred thousands desktops.
FISL 2013: The State of Rio Grande do Sul adopts ODF and LibreOffice as document edition format and tool of choice.FISL 2013: Community gathering at the largest opensource event in Brazil: From left to right: Olivier Hallot, Bjoern Michaelsen, Italo Vignoli (TDF), Dr. Richard Stallman (FSF), Eliane Domingos, Gustavo Pacheco, David Jourdain (LibreOffice community)
Next in August we had the CONSEGI, in Brasilia, where the federal public administration get together to deal with a broad set of issues related to FOSS, and where our Chairman Florian Effenberger was invited as keynote speaker, together with most of the Brazilian community to run lectures, workshops and round-tables on FOSS and LibreOffice. The Document Foundation represented by Florian and Ms Eliane Domingos received the “Demoiselle” Award in recognition of the contribtion for the communities of open source software.
CONSEGI 2013: The “Demoiselle” award for achievements in the OpenSource community to The Document Foundation (Florian Effenberger) and Eliane Domingos (LibreOffice Brazilian community)
In October, we ran the LibreOffice show and partied for its 3rd birthday in Latinoware, an event that happens in Foz do Iguaçu, in the triple border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, sponsored by Itaipu Binacional, the company that operates the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam. This event is a gathering of several nationals interested in promoting FOSS among their citizens and a project to translate LibreOffice to guarani, the native language of Paraguay, emerged.
Celebrating LibreOffice Anniversary in LatinoWare 2013: from left to right: Julio Neves, Eliane Domingos, Vitorio Furusho, Klaibson Ribeiro and JoĂŁo Fernando
Finally we attended CISL-2013, the Argentinian congress for open source in Buenos Aires to deliver 3 lectures on LibreOffice achievements, on migrations, development and community gathering, in an effort to stimulate the Argentinian community to get more active.
CISL 2013 in Buenos Aires: Olivier Hallot (TDF) sharing experience in migrations for large organizations.
Development
All events of 2013 also aimed to harvest new developers for LibreOffice. From initial compilation to the first patches, the developer community grew in quantity and quality. We were able do send two Brazilian developers to Freiburg, Germany to participate in the Freiburg Hackfest. We were happy that Marcos Souza got his LibreOffice Developer Certification.
The community also has it say in 2013. The documentation team leaded by Raul Pacheco and Vera Cavalcante finished the translation of the Writer and Calc User Manual. This is a huge effort that the Brazilian collaborators undertake to bring knowledge to end-users, not only in Brazilian Portuguese but also for the broader Portuguese-speaking community.
The LibreOffice Magazine, an e-magazine in PDF writen and edited by the Brazilian community leaded by Eliane Domingos e Vera Cavalcante, released 6 editions on time with more than 70 A5 pages each full of information on open source software in general, LibreOffice tutorials and case studies for migration and deployments. This magazine is actually edited on a collaboration basis and is not funded by advertisements or any other means. We recorded an average of 20.000 downloads of the magazine on each edition and we have 449 followers of the magazine twitter account.
Celebrating the 3rd anniversary of LibreOffice and the 1st of LibreOffice Magazine
Responding to the trend towards social networks, the community also gathered around LibreOffice in FaceBook, Twitter and Google+. In these profiles, we have 1900 followers in the LibreOffice facebook page as well as 1400 more in the LibreOffice Facebook group. On Twitter, we have 1800 followers and 1328 in Google+.
Last, but not least, the year ended with the Document Foundation Board of Director elections where our colleague Eliane Domingos was elected. That will make 2014 even better to follow!
