TDF Community Blog

Announcing the election for the next TDF Board of Directors

2021-10-192021-11-03

Marina Latini, on behalf of the Membership Committee, writes:

On October 18, we officially announced the upcoming election for the next Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice.

As per § 7 II of our statutes (binding German version and non-binding English translartion) the Board’s term lasts two years. The current Board started its duty on February 18, 2020. Therefore, the old Board remains in charge until the end of February 17, 2022, so the new Board will be in charge the day after that, which is February 18, 2022.

That upcoming term will then (regularly) end on February 17, 2024, so the next election of the Board of Directors will take place before.

As per § 6 III, only members of the Board of Trustees of The Document Foundation, as well as current members of any of its bodies, are eligible to be elected into the Board of Directors, and the election is prepared and supervised by the Membership Committee (§ 7 II).

The active electoral right is reserved to those who have been members of the Board of Trustees before this announcement (§ 7 II).

§ 6 III also states that members of the Board of Directors or their deputies may not be members of the Membership Committee and vice versa. This means that current members of the Membership Committee are eligible to be elected, but with the acceptance of their new role they lose their current role in the MC. For clarification, they have to step down from the Membership Committee, with effect no later than to the beginning of the new term of the Board of Directors, the minute before accepting to become a member of the Board of Directors.

There is one more notable limitation: Per § 8 IV of the statutes, a maximum of 1/3 members of the Board of Directors is allowed to work on an employment basis for the same company, organisation, entity or one of its affiliate organisations.

Nomination of candidates fulfilling the above requirements, as well as self nomination is welcome. In total, at least seven Board of Directors members are required, and given there are enough candidates, up to three deputies can be elected (§ 7 II). As deputies are on duty quite often, we encourage many candidates to participate.

Re-election of current members of the Board of Directors is permitted (§ 7 II).

Please send nominations and self-nominations via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private) and at the same time to board-discuss@documentfoundation.org (which is a public mailing list).

We kindly ask nominees who would like to stand for election to provide a statement of up to 75 words – longer statements will be cut off at the maximum – on their candidacy as continuous text (so no bullet lists or multiple paragraphs). In addition, you have to provide and keep up to date your full name, e-mail address and your corporate affiliation, if any, or state the lack of an affiliation, and please announce that you will provide information on all future changes as soon as possible. Specifically, it is necessary to indicate all information regarding § 8 IV of the statutes.

Discussions with the candidates and questions to them as well as questions about the election should take place on the public board-discuss@documentfoundation.org mailing list. For details on how to use the mailing list, see here.

Eligible voters will receive further details via email prior to the start of election, including a summary of the candidates, details on how to access the voting system, and instructions on how to independently verify the vote count. Please ensure the Membership Committee has your recent and correct e-mail address on file. For questions, you can reach the Membership Committee in private at elections@documentfoundation.org.

Following the timeline set forth in § 7 II, requiring a 45 day advance notice, we hereby announce the following timeline for the election:

(00:00 is beginning of the day, 24:00 is end of the day)

Monday, 2021-10-18: announcement of the election; and start of the nomination phase
Thursday, 2021-11-25, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the nomination phase (one week before the election starts, as per § 7 II)
Friday, 2021-12-03, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: official start of the election (at least 45 days after announcement of the election, as per § 7 II)
Monday, 2021-12-13, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the election
Tuesday, 2021-12-14: announcement of the preliminary results of the election and acknowledgement of role
Wednesday, 2021-12-15, 00:00 CET/UTC+1: start of the challenging phase
Monday, 2021-12-20, 24:00 CET/UTC+1: end of the challenging phase
afterwards: official announcement of the final results
Friday, 2022-02-18: new Board of Directors officially in charge, and election of a Chairperson and a Deputy Chairperson from among its members

Live sessions with the candidates: Between the end of the nomination phase (Thursday, 2021-11-25, 24:00 CET/UTC+1) and the official start of the election (Friday, 2021-12-03, 00:00 CET/UTC+1), the Membership Committee will organise public – and if possible recorded – live sessions, where members of the Board of Trustees can ask questions to the candidates. Everyone, also non-members, is invited to join these sessions. We will also make available to the general public the recordings and the answers given.

Questions to the candidates: In addition, after the end of the nomination phase (Thursday, 2021-11-25, 24:00 CET/UTC+1), the Membership Committee will provide a set of questions to all the candidates. All candidates are kindly invited to send their answers, which will also be made available to the general public.

Be advised that the newly elected Board of Directors will only be in charge from February 18, 2022 on. The current Board of Directors will however include them in the decision making process, to ease up the transition.

Challenges to this announcement with respect to the deadlines outlined have to happen no later than seven (7) days after this announcement, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

Challenges to the preliminary results of the election have to happen until the deadline set forth above, via e-mail to elections@documentfoundation.org (which reaches the Membership Committee in private).

Community Member Monday: Hlompho Mota

2021-10-182021-10-18

Today we’re talking to Hlompho Mota, who’s working on the Sesotho LibreOffice translation project in Lesotho…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I am a native of Lesotho, and a dreamer and a person who aspires to make changes. Currently I’m working in a business that serves other businesses in Lesotho to get recognition in the market, and generally grow to become more self-reliant. Other than my business, I do try and dabble in technology and try to understand how it works – and get a sense on how it can be relevant in the area of life that I live in at this moment.

But besides that, I consider myself as lifelong learner and I hope that the learning will continue for the rest of my life. Currently, I’m a self-taught developer trying to participate in as many open-source projects as possible, with the hope of bringing much-needed development to my part of the world.

How did the Sesotho LibreOffice translation project get started?

I’ll refer to a few individuals who I came across, who grew the seeds to contribute to this project.

Mamako Mota: My wife, who was somehow able to believe in some of my vision, and hopes that the vision will become reality someday. She was willing to help me get the word out to people.

Edwin R Brown: One of the most intelligent people that I had the honour of meeting. He lived by his philosophy of trying to make the world a better place. During the times that he came to Lesotho, we were able to talk about some of the many ways that we looked at the world. However, given that there are some serious changes that need to be brought about with developing the country, I feel that we need some changes in the outlook in my part of the world, and only then will we be able to understand this man’s vision.

Vincent D. Warmerdam: A machine learning practitioner and another person I was humbled enough to meet. From how he hold his talks on in the Python community, right down to how he does his work – it all radiates a purpose that has inspired me to have an outlook on what can happen when people have enthusiasm for the work that they do. Besides that, he has shown me some of the ways that vision can be used to develop language, and has shared the tools and resources that he personally developed.

Maele Neko: One person who I originally spent time with, where we had hoped to make significant developments in Lesotho and Sesotho. But we were originally came across the challenges that came along with translating, due to the differences in Lesotho and South African dialect. The challenges in life and the discussions I’ve had with him have inspired me to continue. However, he was able to contribute to Sesotho knowledge and language on Twitter.

Lastly, Red Hat, the company: I see it as a company that was driven to make a business model out of open source projects. In time, I would either hope to work with this organization, or build one like it – in the hope that I can be the change that is needed in Lesotho and Africa in total.

Is free and open source software widely known/used in Lesotho? Are there any challenges there to wider adoption?

This is where there is a tragedy, yet I aspire to help with creating a solution. Given some of the dynamics that are involved in the size and demographics of the the population, there has been little support from many of the profit-driven organizations. To make matters worse, the adoption of open source is yet to reach ideal levels because of the lack of understanding – because technology as a whole in our part of the world has been slow. The drive to do better is something that still needs to be developed.

With that being said, there are other parts of the my world where my work and passion cross paths – mainly in terms of developing businesses to become better, and helping them to become technologically savvy. So in that light, the aim of this project would be realised in time, when businesses begin to embrace technology, and the language barrier will be tackled in one way or another. In this case, my vision is that Lesotho will become a home of open source – and will become more of a player in the tech sector, rather than just a spectator.

How can people help with the translation or general promotion in your area?

The vision is not just in translation, but that we go though this process and that Lesotho has a better understanding of open source and technology. The open source community needs to understand that the vision of open source (or at least from my view) has always been about making progress more relatable to society as a whole, than just about competing with closed source software.

However, I hope to do my bit to make sure that open source spreads to as many people as possible. Translation is the first part of this, but in time I hope to be an ambassador and developer. (After fumbling with C and C++, hopefully I can help there as well.)

From this point onwards, I hope that we can not only just translate, but have a contextual discussion on why some ideas are named the way that they are – and hopefully then, open source can then make the impact that it’s meant to make.

Many thanks to Hlompho for his work, and sharing his thoughts! Check out our Native Language Projects for LibreOffice in many other languages around the world – and if yours is missing, you can help us to add it!

Next batch of videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

2021-10-152021-10-18

Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:

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Individual links

Note: many of these are also available on PeerTube, and more will be added…

Stay tuned for more videos from rooms 2 and 3 of the conference!

Let’s do awesome things! Get support for your projects and ideas from our budget

2021-10-152021-10-15

Want to organise a local (or online) LibreOffice event? Need some merchandise to boost your project or community? Then we can help you! The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, is backed by contributions from ecosystem members and volunteers, as well as donations from end-users. This helps us to maintain TDF, but we can do a lot more too. And next year, we want to do a lot of projects again!

Each year, we set a budget that LibreOffice projects and communities can use for financial support. Some examples:

Booking a location, and travel refunds for a local event (eg a translation sprint)
Merchandise for community members, to use at events and conferences
Infrastructure to start a new project (or help an existing one)

So if you have some ideas for a meetup, project or activity that could benefit from financial help, let us know! We can also assist you in other ways: our team members are there to help you, and enable you to do exciting and interesting things.

You don’t need to work out all the technical details right now – the main thing is that we have an overview. To help us with planning, we kindly ask you to send your ideas by the end of November, as we try to prepare the 2022 annual budget during December.

You can send your proposal (with estimated costs) to budgets@documentfoundation.org and we’ll take a look. Of course, can’t guarantee that everything will be approved, but we’d love to hear your ideas!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.2 Community

2021-10-142021-10-14

Berlin, October 14, 2021 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.2.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.2 family targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, which is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. This version includes 68 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

LibreOffice 7.2.2 Community is also available for Apple Silicon from this link: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.2/mac/aarch64/.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.2.2 Community

LibreOffice 7.2.2 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.1.6.

LibreOffice 7.2.2 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.2.2/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.2.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Tender to implement C++ accessibility tests (#202110-01)

2021-10-13

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.

We are looking for an individual or company to implement C++ accessibility tests.

The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version.

The current accessibility tests are rather incomplete and hard to maintain. Additionally, they are written in Java.

The scope of this tender is to convert them into in-process cppunit-based tests and create a solid foundation in both code as well as documentation to facilitate extending the coverage both as part of this tender as well as for follow-up contributions. TDF aims to prepare a good infrastructure and documentation, so that adding further tests is much simpler in the future, even for new kinds of widgets, up to a point where they could be implemented as part of our EasyHacks. The implementation therefore has to be solid and thorough to support future test cases easily.

We recommend the following steps to approach the tender deliverable:

assessing the technical requirements (both using the existing tests to convert, plus the various requirements of a11y in general)
assessing the current status
designing and creating the new required interfaces, or adapting or augmenting existing ones
creating helpers to ease writing tests
writing some tests to both serve as examples and proof of concept (at least a couple for each key aspect of testing, but exercising the infrastructure to validate it is key to having something that has a chance of withstanding the test of time)
extensive documentation on all those, plus how to write tests and such
peer review

Therefore, this tender should provide the infrastructure to:

Test the interfaces (AT-SPI, UIA, MSAA, etc.) allowing accessibility tools (ATs) such as e.g. screen readers, magnifier glasses, etc. to access the information required to perform their tasks. This requires testing the LibreOffice implementation of the AT interfaces themselves to catch issues at the outer edge. It is crucial because even if all is well working inside LibreOffice itself, but the information is not properly sent to the platform, it still won’t work for users. Also, it probably has to be done for each platform separately (Desktop Linux (AT-SPI2), Windows (UIA, MSAA), macOS etc.) as their APIs are different, even if often similar, and have separate modules in LibreOffice.
Test that there is enough information sent through those interfaces and that it is accurate and usable. This could rely on internal unified interfaces to fetch information and interact with the UI, but there still is a fair bit of diversity on what needs to be tested.
Test that functionalities are usable with different type of input (e.g. work with the keyboard, as it’s the most common offender). Also this could rely on internal unified interfaces to fetch information and interact with the UI, but there still is a fair bit of diversity on what needs to be tested.

A key item of the deliverables for this tender is the extensive documentation (in addition to the source-code documentation) that will allow to both maintain the converted tests as well as create additional tests. The documentation shall include (but is not limited to) common pitfalls with accessibility related tests (like timeouts/waiting for events/deal with load dependent/parallelism differences) and how to deal with them. The documentation could walk the developer through the process behind the creation of newly created tests, showcasing both the obvious and not-so-obvious hurdles with that specific tests/a11y related tests in general and how they were dealt with. Aiming for an extendable framework, this likely requires creating new interfaces for missing functionality for reuse in tests.

We expect bidders to provide information on both the code and the non-code parts of this tender, e.g. methodology, structure and technical aspects. The Document Foundation will publish this under a free and open source license and make it available to the general public.

Required skills

Extensive knowledge of C++
Experience working on the LibreOffice source code

Other skills

English (conversationally fluent in order to coordinate and plan with members of TDF)

We use free, libre and open source (FLOSS) software for development wherever possible, and the resulting work must be licensed under the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, sex, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age.

Bidders will get a preference for including a partner or independent developer who has not been involved in a successful tender before.

As always, TDF will give some preference to individuals who have previously shown a commitment to TDF, including but not limited to certified developers and/or members of TDF. Not being a member, or never having contributed before, does not exclude any applicants from consideration.

The task offered is a project-based one-off, with no immediate plans to a mid- or long-term contractual relationship. It is offered on a freelance, project basis. Individuals and companies applying can be located anywhere in the world.

When budgeting, we anticipated that this project (all items combined) to take in the region of 30 days of work. Should bidders’ assessment result in a significantly different number, please reach out to us before sending your bid, so we can clarify upfront.

TDF is looking forward to receiving your applications for one or more of the aforementioned tasks, your financial expectations and the earliest date of your availability, via e-mail to a committee at tender20211001@documentfoundation.org no later than November 26, 2021.

Applicants who have not received feedback by December 23, 2021 should consider that their application, after careful review, was not accepted.

All bidders are invited to ask their questions on this tender until November 19, 2021. Questions and answers will be made public in a collected and anonymized form.

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