Help us to squeeze out bugs!
For those interested in helping to squeeze out some bugs of LibreOffice, the community hosts monthly bug hunting sessions. The next one is tomorrow, September 6th. More details can be found at the respective wiki page.
Board Elections: Nominations Open
Simon Phipps today announced that the nominations for the board elections are now open.
The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.4.3
The Internet, August 31, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) maintains the speedy pace of LibreOffice development with the announcement of version 3.4.3, intended for enterprise deployments. The new release arrives two weeks after version 3.3.4 (intended for more-conservative users) and one month after the previous release of the 3.4 family, which provides a larger feature set based on cleaner and leaner code.
TDF maintains two editions of LibreOffice to satisfy the needs of a large and diverse user base, although we strongly recommend everyone to update to the 3.4 series in the near future. LibreOffice 3.4.2 has already been deployed by users at Itaipu Binacional in Brazil, the largest electrical power plant in the world, and has been key for the launch of a large migration project involving 25,000 desktops by Copenhagen hospitals in Denmark.
From September 2nd to September 4th, the LibreOffice community will host this year’s Hackfest together with the Linux Migration Project of the city of Munich in Germany (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011). The meeting has the objective of improving the collaboration between TDF and corporate users of LibreOffice, in order to better match the time based release schedule with the needs of organizations with very large deployments of the office suite.
LibreOffice 3.4.3 is immediately available for download in over 100 language versions from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/commit-log-libreoffice-3-4-release-3.4.3.1.log.
In October, the community around TDF and LibreOffice will gather in Paris for the first LibreOffice Conference (http://conference.libreoffice.org/). The keynotes and the agenda of the event will be announced soon, together with a program of workshops and trainings for TDF members. Participation in the event is free of charge, and only requires you to register at http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/.
Join the LibreOffice Hackfest!
Dear Community,
next weekend, from September 2nd to 4th, the first LibreOffice Hackfest will take place in the city of Munich, Germany.
The Hackfest is the gathering of LibreOffice developers from all around the world, where experienced coders and interested developers meet and work on the code, fix bugs and implement new features. Plus, it is a great chance to see many faces from the community in the wonderful setting of Bavaria’s capital city.
Participation is free of charge, and the best is, we still have free seats available!
If you want to contribute code to LibreOffice, or get in touch with members of our community, the LibreOffice Hackfest is the place to be! And for those not so experienced in developing, we will host a special session on hacking pasta. 😉
More details on the planned agenda and on the venues are available in our wiki at
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011
Looking forward to hacking with you in Munich!
Florian
on behalf of the Hackfest organizers
Election Announcement for The Document Foundation Board of Directors
Simon Phipps posted the following today on the announcement mailing list:
Having been asked by the Steering Committee and Membership Committee to act as the Elections Officer for The Document Foundation, it is my pleasure to announce that we will now conduct the election of a Board of Directors. This election is following the Bylaws [1] of our Foundation. The term is one year commencing from the date the Foundation is legally established.
There are seven (7) board seats that are to be filled during this election. Three (3) additional deputies are to be selected, so the total of slots to be filled by election is ten (10).
Members of The Document Foundation as of 2011-09-02 are eligible to vote in the elections. Anyone who has made a contribution to The Document Foundation can apply for membership by completing an application [2]. To vote, your membership also needs to be valid at least until the end of the elections (2011-10-26).
Any eligible voter is also eligible to be elected to the Board of Directors. To announce your candidacy, send a message to steering-discuss@documentfoundation.org with your full name, e-mail, corporate affiliation (if any), and a description of your reasons for wanting to serve as a director. Candidacies must be announced prior to 2011-09-30, 23:59 UTC.
All candidates should also send a summary of their candicacy announcement to elections@documentfoundation.org – a compilation of the summaries will be mailed to all registered voters several days prior to the elections. Summaries should be no more than 75 words of continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs) and must be received by the nomination deadline given above.
All discussion related to the elections should be held on discuss@documentfoundation.org where Members are invited to ask questions to one or all candidates. Instructions explaining how to vote will be sent via e-mail to all eligible voters by 2011-10-07.
The 10 candidates voted for most as counted by a single transferable vote system [3] will be elected, except that no more than two individuals affiliated with any one corporation may be elected. Should more than two of the top ten vote-getters be affiliated with the same company, only the two with the most votes will be considered elected.
In the event of a tie for the final seat on the board or the final deputy slot, the Membership Committee will schedule run-off elections as soon as possible. The Membership Committee will announce preliminary results as soon as possible after the elections close, along with instructions on how to access the votes archive and how to independently verify the vote count.
Any eligible voter may challenge the preliminary results by e-mailing elections@documentfoundation.org prior to 2011-10-26. The published decision of the Membership Committee as to any challenge shall be final. Once any challenges have been resolved, the Membership Committee shall announce the final results.
Any questions regarding these procedures should be directed to the Membership Committee by e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org . The committee shall have the power to make any necessary changes or clarifications to these rules at any point during the elections.
[1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/CommunityBylaws
[2] http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/application-for-tdf-community-membership/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Transferable_Vote
Election Timeline (all deadlines are 23:59 UTC)
2011-08-23: Announcement of elections
2011-09-02: Freeze of membership applications, list of candidates opens.
2011-10-01: Last day to announce candidacies, submit summary statements.
2011-10-03: Final list of candidates is published.
2011-10-07: Instructions mailed to eligible voters, voting begins.
2011-10-17: Voting closes.
2011-10-20: Preliminary results are announced.
2011-10-26: Last day to challenge preliminary results.
2011-10-27: Announcement of final results
This is a landmark in the history of The Document Foundation and I encourage all Members to participate fully.
LibreOffice 3.3.4 is Ready for Download
The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.4, a new release of the free office suite’s 3.3 branch. The new version is available for download at http://www.libreoffice.org/download
LibreOffice 3.3.4 fixes several bugs, the next maintenance release 3.3.5 is scheduled for October. In the meantime, development is continuing on the 3.4 series, which offers new features. The next version in that branch – LibreOffice 3.4.3 – is expected by the end of August.
The Document Foundation maintains two editions of LibreOffice: version 3.3.x caters to conservative users, who wish to stick to a proven release in deep maintenance mode, with increasingly infrequent updates, while the 3.4 branch provides a more modern and featurefull release. We therefore strongly recommend everyone to update to the 3.4 series in the near future.
LibreOffice 3.3.4 is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, in over 100 different languages (more than twice the language coverage of comparable proprietary products).
Detailed technical change logs are available at http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/bugfixes-libreoffice-3-3-release-3.3.4.1.log and http://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/src/commit-log-libreoffice-3-3-release-3.3.4.1.log
The next events where you can meet developers and community members will be the LibreOffice Hackfest, taking place this September in Munich (http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011) and the LibreOffice Conference, taking place this October in Paris (http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/)