The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2022, it took place in Milan, Italy
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Due to the COVID pandemic and travel restrictions our conferences for 2020 and 2021 had to take place online. For 2022, however, we could finally meet in-person again – although we live-streamed sessions, for participants to watch remotely (and they could ask questions in our chat channels too).
The conference took place from September 28 – October 1, in the Fondazione Culturale San Fedele, in downtown Milan. Four rooms were made available for the event: the auditorium, along with Ricci, Loyola and Saverio.
Conference Tracks and extra sessions
Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, OpenDocument Format, Quality Assurance, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of the software and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.
In addition to the talks, where was also a community dinner evening, in which various kinds of pasta were served, along with a walking tour of interesting parts of the city. On the final day, the conference wrapped up with a closing session, headed by Italo Vignoli who helped to organise the event.
Sponsoring and merchandise
The event was sponsored by Collabora, allotropia, Net Service S.p.A and Passbolt. Thanks to this sponsoring, attendees could get merchandise at the conference, including T-shirts with the conference logo.
Full Programme
Full details about the event are available on our main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule.
Videos from most of the talks are available in this playlist:
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Conference in 2023
Planning is already underway for the LibreOffice Conference 2023, which is due to take place in Bucharest, Romania in September. The local organisation team has already found a suitable location, and is now working on other preparations for the event, including visas for attendees, catering and merchandise. We at TDF are helping them to get things ready, and are very grateful for their work.
The Brazilian Community Gave a Presentation at the FLISOL-DF event (Festival Latino Americano de Instalação de Software Livre) about the LibreOffice Project.
Translation by Timothy Brennan Jr.
With the participation of Luciana Motta, Henderson Matsuura, Túlio Macedo and Timothy Brennan Jr., all members of The Document Foundation, the Brazilian LibreOffice community had the opportunity to give a presentation on the dynamics of LibreOffice in Brazil and their interaction with the international project.
Timothy and Luciana gave a lecture in conjunction entitled “I Don’t Know How to Code: How to contribute?” demonstrating how the LibreOffice project benefits from the volunteer and participative work of those who have foreign language skills, professional proofreading in Brazilian Portuguese, marketing and the promotion of software products, as well as coding in various modern computer languages where the gains acquired by individuals is always the unique experience of working alongside a team of professionals, both domestic and international. FLISOL was, additionally, an opportunity for a personal get-together of the Brazil team. This event focused on interaction and the exchange of ideas.
Team Brazil
FLISOL-DF, in the Federal District of Brazil’s capital, Brasília, took place on April 15, 2023 at the campus of Taguatinga (one of the Federal Districts satellite cities around Brasília) in the Universidade Católica de Brasília with the presence of Professor Wesley Sepulveda, and was organized by a team of volunteers lead by Henderson Matsuura.
Every major release of LibreOffice includes new features, thanks to our community of volunteer and ecosystem developers. But what can you do, if you want a new feature in LibreOffice but don’t have the technical know-how to implement it?
If you’re in a large company, you can engage with the LibreOffice ecosystem to get professional support. Or if you’re a regular end user, you can support individual developers for their work. For instance, Andreas Heinisch recently improved LibreOffice’s AutoText dialog with pre-filled text and a shortcut name, based on selected text, like this:
If users want me to fix a certain issue, they can fund me to fix a bug or implement an enhancement, like I did for a fire department in Italy (create Table of Contents from the current chapter level only), or some small changes for TDF (fixing a redraw bug in Calc, and the renaming of macro libraries).
Andreas has worked on 173 other fixes and improvements, as you can see on the bug tracker. Many thanks for all his work! And to other developers in our community: you too can consider setting up a Patreon page too (or similar system), to get financial support for your work, and provide a way for end users to fund the improvements they want.
In 2022 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Election of new Membership Committee
The mission of the Membership Committee (MC) is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in The Document Foundation’s Foundation’s Statutes. It initiates and supervises the election of the Board of Directors, and The Board of Trustees elects from among its members the Membership Committee for a period of two years.
In August, we had live town-hall meetings with the Membership Committee candidates, in multiple timezones, to ensure that as many people as possible (both candidates and TDF members) could take part and ask their questions. We made video recordings of these meetings, and posted them on our video channels and blog, for those who couldn’t take part live:
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Voting tokens were sent out to TDF members at the end of August, and then the voting process began, running until September 7. Then, on September 9, TDF’s Board announced the preliminary results, along with a confirmation period.
On September 17, we announced the final results, with the following confirmed as Full MC Members: Miklos Vajna, Marina Latini (tied for first), Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Gabriele Ponzo, Uwe Altmann. Deputies: Shinji Enoki, Balázs Varga, Ahmad Haris.
TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running.
Advisory Board members and meetings
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis SyGroup, allotropia software GmbH, Red Hat, Hypra, Collabora, GNOME, Google, Kopano b.v., City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), CIB Software, IHC Invest Inc., Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., UK Government Digital Services, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, software and community, and described plans and activities for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s work, and various ideas and proposals were discussed during the calls. TDF would like to express its thanks to all of the members for their help and support.
Highlights of activities
Throughout the year, TDF supported – and provided information about – various campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, in January, we supported a “bug bounty programme” for finding and fixing security holes with European Commission funds. With help and coordination from their recently formed Open Source Programme Office (OSPO), the European Commission started a series of hackathon and “bug bounty” programmes to help selected projects find (and potentially fix) security issues.
The Commission’s OSPO set aside €200,000 to reward developers and researchers who find critical security vulnerabilities in free software projects (such as LibreOffice and Mastodon). TDF got involved, and as Paolo Vecchi from the foundation’s Board of Directors said:
We at TDF and our community are grateful for the opportunity that has been provided with to make LibreOffice even more secure and ready to potentially become the preferred open source office suite also within European institutions.
In April and November 2022, we supported an open letter about the universal right to install any software on any device. Earlier in the year, together with more than 100 European organisations and companies, The Document Foundation signed this letter, and encouraged others to do the same. The signees of this open letter recognised that free access to hardware and software determines how long or how often a device can be used or reused, and declared that the increased longevity and reusability of their devices are inevitable for a more sustainable digital society.
In September and October, TDF announced that it was directly providing LibreOffice on the Mac App Store (Apple) and Microsoft Store. The announcement reflected the project’s new marketing strategy: The Document Foundation is focused on the release of the Community version, while ecosystem companies are focused on value-added long-term supported versions targeted at enterprises. The distinction has the objective of educating organizations to support the FOSS project by choosing the LibreOffice version best suited for their needs, instead of the Community version generously supported by volunteers. Of course, TDF will continue to provide LibreOffice free of charge from the LibreOffice website for all users.
Finally, throughout the year we celebrated our community of translators, which provide LibreOffice in over 110 different languages (with more hopefully becoming available in the future), more than any other software. This helps us to fulfil one of the most important objectives of The Document Foundation: “to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all people to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their native language”. Today, there are over four billion people in the world who can use LibreOffice in their native languages. We are very thankful to our hard-working community, which makes all of this possible.
In 2022, LibreOffice celebrated its twelfth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice 7.3
On February 2, LibreOffice 7.3 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.
For instance, large improvements were made to change tracking, with especially when tables are altered and paragraphs are moved (László Németh, NISZ). Colour Filter support was added to the “Standard Filter” dialog in Calc (Samuel Mehrbrodt, allotropia), while PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes were added to Impress (Jun Nogata). On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.
With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.3. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.
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LibreOffice 7.4
Later in the year, on August 18, TDF released LibreOffice 7.4. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.
In terms of features, this release added support for “sparklines” in Calc (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora). These are very small line charts, without axes or coordinates, to provide a quick overview of trends – as opposed to a full chart with details. Then, support for WebP images (Luboš Luňák, Collabora) and EMZ/WMZ files (Paris Oplopoios) was added, along with integration of the remote grammar checker LanguageTool (Mert Tümer; Collabora).
Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the Indonesian LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version) to demonstrate the new features:
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Open source continues to grow, as shown by data provided by reports of analysts (top left & right) and by declarations of users (bottom left & right).
Top Left: In two years, proprietary software is expected to shrink from 45% to 37% while enterprise open source is expected to grow from 29% to 34%. Community based OSS is also expected to grow from 21% to 24%. In total, in two years open source software will reach an estimated enterprise market share of 58%.
Top Right: The same chart, split between geographical areas: APAC (Asia and Pacific), EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), LATAM (Latin America) e US (United States). The difference in percentages between the different areas is really negligible, confirming a global trend.
Bottom Left: Over 76% of IT managers has increased the use of open source software during 2022, while almost 22% has not changed the amount of OSS and less than 2% has reduced the amount of open source software.
Bottom Right: The same chart, split between geographical areas. In this case, the differences between regions is visible, with Middle East, Africa, Asia, North America and Latin America leading in term of global increase with a percentage higher than 75%, followed by UK and Europe with 70% and Asia Pacific with 60%.
