Our Taiwanese community reports back from a recent event:
The LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 was held in Taipei from 2 – 3 August. This conference was suspended for several years due to the pandemic and was relaunched in Indonesia last year.
In addition to the local community, there were many partners from the Japanese and Indonesian communities, as well as experts from Germany and Italy, representing The Documentation Foundation and the Open Document Format Technical Committee, who attended this conference.
The main visual design of the conference was developed by students at the Open Design Club in National Chengchi University. They boldly adopted the theme of “rice” since that’s a common staple food in Asian countries, and created a series of exquisite logos, icons and merchandise.
Staff in Government Day and the main poster
There were two main topics in this conference: Government Day and Community Day.
Government Day
The first day, “Government Day”, focused on Open Document Format (ODF) policy and “Public Money, Public Code” (PMPC). Six scholars and experts along with LibreOffice community members were invited to give talks, which covered topics from policy theory to practical practices when adopting ODF and PMPC in government. The audience was mostly made up of users from central and local government units.
The first speaker was Lothar Becker, co-chairman of TDF’s Certification Committee and also a board member of Open Source Business Alliance in Germany. This talk summarized lessons learned from 25 years of migration experiences to LibreOffice Technology in governmental organizations, from famous ones like the “LiMux” project in Munich, to up-to-date migration projects for 30,000 PCs in the government of the German state Schleswig-Holstein.
The second speaker was Prof. Naiyi Hsiao, the chair of Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University. This session explored what and why the PMPC practice has encountered legal and administrative concerns among the diverse stakeholders.
The third speaker was Director Cheng Ming Wang, the general director of Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for the ODF policy in Taiwan. His talk introduced three aspects of Taiwan’s ODF promotion: why Taiwan promotes ODF; the process and current status of ODF promotionl and the next steps.
The fourth speaker was Svante Schubert, co-chairman and co-editor of the ODF Technical Committee. His talk briefly gave an introduction to ODF and provided an update. In addition, he explained how the TDF-hosted ODF Toolkit is facilitating daily ODF usage (like for automated document translation).
The fifth speaker was Italo Vignoli, Board of Directors member of The Document Foundation. His talk discussed the role of open source software and open standards in digital sovereignty. Today, user-created content – and the ability to share it transparently – is in the hands of a few companies that take advantage of users’ limited digital culture. This situation can only be overcome by moving from proprietary to open source software and from proprietary to open standards.
The last session was from Prof. Tyng-Ruey Chuang, the Associate Research Fellow/Professor of Institute of Information Science in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. In this presentation, he highlighted the important roles of data infrastructure in facilitating the development and sharing of communal digital resources, and related the practice of communal data infrastructure to the Public Money Public Code (PMPC) initiative.
Group photo of Government Day
Community Day
The second day of the conference was dedicated to the LibreOffice community, and was organized as a COSCUP session track. Community members from Taiwan, Indonesia, Germany, Italy, and Japan shared various topics. Italo Vignoli spoke about the history and evolution of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation. Lothar Becker shared several funny and ridiculous stories from his experiences helping different organizations to adopt LibreOffice. Two LibreOffice Certified Profession Trainers from Taiwan, Kai-Ju Tsai and Teresa Hou, demonstrated advanced applications of Writer and Calc. The Indonesian community focused on visual design, sharing their experiences in creating presentation templates, vector graphics and themes for LibreOffice.
Additionally, a member of the team who organized last year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference in Indonesia discussed the challenges and joys of planning international events. The Japanese community shared their difficult experiences in advocating LibreOffice to local governments and private sectors in Japan, resonating deeply with participants from other countries!
Italo Vignoli introduced TDF to the Asian community
LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainer Kai-Ju Tsai demonstrated advanced usage of Writer
Two young Indonesian community members showed how they learned to make designs using open source tools like Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw
Additional Activities
In addition to the two-day main topics, there were also several additional activities.
On 4 August, the Open Design Club of National Chengchi University held a “Design workshop”. In this workshop, students from ODC and Indonesian community members divided into groups, and were challenged to design a movie poster in 30 minutes. Then they shared their experiences and work of designing using open source tools.
Students from Taiwan and Indonesian community members designed a movie poster together
On 5 August, Franklin Weng, the president of Software Liberty Association Taiwan, led a group of ten international community members, including Svante Schubert, Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker, to visit the Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs, which is responsible for promoting ODF policies.
They were received by General Director Cheng Ming Wang, Senior Analysts Chun-Wei Tsai and Tsung-Yen Wang, and Section Chief of Application Development, Chun-Chieh Chen. The meeting discussed various possibilities for participating in the ODF Technical Committee and collaborating with The Document Foundation’s certification system, as well as exchanging views on future artificial intelligence (AI) trends.
Visit to Department of Digital Service, Ministry of Digital Affairs
During these days, several major Asian community leaders also reached an agreement that next year’s LibreOffice Asia Conference will be held in Japan. We look forward to LibreOffice/ODF/PMPC taking root more deeply in Asia!
End users looking for support will be helped by the immediate availability of the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started Guide, which is available for download from the following link: https://books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they will be able to get first-level technical support from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.
