Sponsorship Package for LibreOffice Conference 2022
The Sponsorship Package for the LibreOffice Conference 2022 in Milan is now available:
2022milanconferencesponsorshipConference Sponsorship Package
Annual Report 2021: Attracting new contributors to LibreOffice
Bringing new community members on board, and helping them to get started in the LibreOffice community, is an essential part of our work. Here’s what we did in 2021…
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
Onboarding tools and sites
Joining a large and established project like LibreOffice can be daunting for many. The software has a large codebase, and sub-projects use a wide array of tools. In recent years, we’ve made efforts to simplify the onboarding process by linking more services together with SSO (single sign-on), thereby reducing some of the complexity. In addition, we’ve created Easy Hacks and similar “bite size” projects in other areas, so that newcomers can get involved quickly and achieve something without months of work.
Currently, we have two websites/pages that function as starting points for new contributors: What Can I Do For LibreOffice and the Get Involved page. The former was set up by LibreOffice’s Albanian community, and lets users click through topics of interest, until they find something they want to do. The latter is a regular page, with a list of sub-projects inside LibreOffice, and quick steps to make initial contact.
Throughout 2021, we posted regular “Community Member Monday” interviews on this blog. In many cases, we emphasised how these contributors started off as regular LibreOffice users, but wanted to “scratch an itch” and start to make changes to the software. We highlighted the ways in which other community members helped newcomers to start working on projects, and used these as “success stories” on our social media accounts, encouraging others to make the step-up from being a user to an active contributor.
In addition, we have accounts and projects listed on various volunteering platforms, including VolunteerMatch and Idealist (English), Vostel (German), Vapaaehtoistyo (Finnish), TuDu (Polish) and HeroClan, Um sem um tam and Zapojim se (Czech).
LibreOffice New Generation
In early 2021, we announced LibreOffice New Generation, a project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While The Document Foundation is proud that our community is diverse and has people from all ages, younger people help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to the project. So we wanted to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.
To achieve this, we set up the New Generation project with communication channels, contact points in the community, and initial ideas for things to work on. The community grew quickly, with 300 members arriving in the Telegram group within the space of a few weeks, and many ideas being proposed. One was to create a distinctive flyer that can be distributed in schools and universities, which not only explains what LibreOffice does, but how all users can also get involved and help to improve the software. New Generation community members created an initial design for the flyer, along with an update, and then translated it into several languages. TDF used funds from its marketing budget to get flyers printed and distributed to people around the globe.
Open Badges
We also continued to issue Open Badges, special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming contributions from people in the community. For instance, we sent our personalised badges to French translators of the Math Guide, along with Brazilian Portuguese documentation team members and Czech documentation contributors.
Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!
Indonesian LibreOffice community: recent activities
Rania Amina from the Indonesian LibreOffice community writes:
On Wednesday, 18 May 2022, I had the opportunity to talk in one of the sessions at the Virtual Visit of SMK Amaliah 1 Ciawi Bogor. This activity is a routine agenda for Amaliah Vocational School in the form of seminars and visits to institutions or communities to broaden students’ knowledge of Information and Communication Technology to Support Creative and Innovative Education.
I represent the Indonesian LibreOffice community, given the opportunity to provide material for the activities. The topic that I conveyed revolves around LibreOffice and FOSS in general, and how the open source community ecosystem can be well developed so that it can be a space for self-development before pursuing a career in that field.
This event was held virtually, starting at 08:00 WIB (Western Indonesian Time/GMT+7) until 12:00 WIB, with around 90 participants. The enthusiasm of the participants in this activity was quite high, considering that apparently both LibreOffice and FOSS were new things for the students. On this occasion, I also conveyed to them to never hesitate to start contributing, both in the coding and non-coding spheres, for example as testers, bug hunters, making designs for promotions in their environment, creating events related to LibreOffice, and more.
We hope that – after this activity – LibreOffice ID will collaborate again with Amaliah Vocational School to organize offline activities in the future.
Many thanks to Rania and the community for their great work! Learn more here.
Impress Guide is updated to match LibreOffice Community 7.3
The Impress Guide 7.3 has just arrived with the latest LibreOffice Impress 7.3 developments.
This 374 pages book covers the main features of Impress, the presentations (slide show) component of LibreOffice. You can create slides that contain text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art, and other objects. Impress comes with prepackaged text styles, slide backgrounds, and Help. It can open and save to Microsoft PowerPoint formats and can export to PDF, HTML, and numerous graphic formats.
The Guide update was an effort of Peter Schofield and Kees Kriek.
Thank you guys for the wonderful Impress Guide!
The full set of published LibreOffice guides is available in the LibreOffice Documentation Website and in the LibreOffice Bookshelf Project.
LibreOffice Conference: Call for Papers
LibreOffice Conference 2022 will be a hybrid event, both in presence and remote, scheduled for the month of September, from Thursday, September 29th at 9:00AM CEST, to Saturday, October 1st at 1:00PM CEST (https://conference.libreoffice.org/2022/). In addition, there will be a community day on Wednesday, September 28th. The event will be in Milan, northern Italy.
It will be possible to present from remote on Friday, September 30th (details will follow). Workshops will be possible only in presence, and should be agreed with organizers in order to schedule them in a specific room (which will be recorded but not streamed).
The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s conference. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, the Document Liberation Project or the Open Document Format, we want to hear from you!
Proposals should be filed by July 15, 2022, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.
The conference program will be based on the following tracks:
- Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
- Quality Assurance
- Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
- Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
- Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
- Advocating, Promoting, Marketing LibreOffice
- Diversity and Inclusion, New Generation
Presentations, case studies, and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A).
Please send a short description/bio of yourself as well as your talk/workshop proposal to https://events.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-conference-2022/. If you want to give multiple talks, please send a separate proposal for each.
Please check if you need a VISA to travel to Italy on this page (available in Arabic, English, Russian and Chinese): https://vistoperitalia.esteri.it/. If you need a VISA, please get in touch with Italo Vignoli (italo@libreoffice.org) as soon as possible, to get an invitation letter.
If you cannot travel to Italy and prefer to present from remote, please add a note to your talk proposal, in order to allow organizers to schedule your talk on Friday (and organize a test session in advance).
If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on TDF YouTube channel, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music, pictures, etc.).
Thanks a lot for your participation!
Annual Report: TDF’s infrastructure in 2021
In 2021, the infrastructure team migrated our “Ask LibreOffice” site to Discourse, deployed a Decidim instance, and assisted with video streaming during the LibreOffice Conference.
(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)
LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.
As 2021 marked another “pandemic year” with only online events, the infrastructure team helped to make these a pleasant experience from home. Notably, they deployed a Pretalx instance to manage conference submissions and the schedule, and put in place a streaming backend based on Jitsi/Jibri/RTMP during the annual conference, thereby providing several participation options to chose from.
Ask LibreOffice
After several months of tests and feedback from the community, the infra team also concluded the migration of LibreOffice’s Q&A platform (“Ask LibreOffice”) to Discourse. Over 65,000 questions and 130,000 replies from 50,000 users — spanning over 17 languages — were imported, with a focus on preserving post attribution and overall layout. The metric collection engines (Matomo as well as the public Grimoire Dashboard) were updated to reflect that change.
Also on the community participation front, the infrastructure team deployed a Decidim instance to structure debate and encourage democratic participation from community members. The instance is currently still under test.
On the Continuous Integration (CI) front, the team deployed new buildbots for Windows and Linux baselines, as well as a buildbot for the WebAssembly (WASM) effort. They also migrated and refactored the bibisect setup to better suit the needs of the quality assurance community.
Backends
As for the backends: Debian GNU/Linux 11 (codename “Bullseye”) was released in the middle of 2021, and the team upgraded most of TDF’s virtual machines accordingly during the second half of the year. However, for the lower layers of the virtualization stack, the upgrade is planned for 2022. Furthermore, lots of work was done in planning the restructuring of database engines, most notably around Point-in-Time Recovery; this work was driven by contributor Brett Cornwall. Finally, the team assisted the Membership Committee with the architecture of the back-end side of their new tooling.