LibreOffice can open documents in many formats, including Microsoft Office files (.docx, .xlxs, .pptx). But it’s native file format is the fully open and standardised OpenDocument Format (ODF). At the recent LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Spain, community members gave presentations about news and updates for ODF. So, here are the first videos from the presentations (use headphones for best audio quality).

Firstly, Marina Latini and Italo Vignoli explain the COSM project – the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers:

Version 1.3 of the ODF specification is being developed, and Michael Stahl provides some technical background:

Finally, Svante Schubert introduces the new ODF Toolkit from The Document Foundation:

Keep checking the blog – and our Twitter and Mastodon accounts – for more videos in the coming days and weeks!

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Task 16: replaced (9×) / removed (0×) deprecated |dead-url= and |deadurl= with |url-status=;

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NLnet

Since June of this year, I’m working for NLnet foundation. NLnet gives grants to people to improve the internet.

NLnet is growing because it is handling grants for European Next Generation Internet (NGI) programs. This means more funds for new search technologies and privacy enhancing technologies. Typical grants go towards the creation of materials (mostly software) that are made available under free licenses.

I’m honoured to have been asked for this position and will do my best for the success of the projects that we support.

The list of projects that received support from NLnet is very long. In the past I was lucky enough to get grants from NLnet to work on Calligra, WebODF, and ViewerJS.

Akademy

Akademy starts today, but alas, no akademy for me this year.

I’m celebrating my parents anniversary this weekend and will be at a water park instead of a warm bath of KDE-ers.

Luckily I can attend the new Linux App Summit in Barcelona in November which is back to back with RustFest. So I will not miss out on Free Software desktop conference this year.

My old friend and new colleague Michiel Leenaars is attending Akademy. He will be there to talk about the Next Generation Internet. Michiel will inspire the attendees to come work for an open internet with support from the EU and NLnet. His presentation is just after the Sunday keynote.

Most LibreOffice developers are working from their home offices, so hackfests provide a unique opportunity to spend some time working shoulder-to-shoulder with their peers. In 2018, LibreOffice developers and community members met at four hackfests in Brussels, Hamburg, Tirana and Munich.

Brussels (Belgium), February 5-6

The first hackfest of the year was organized at ICAB in Brussels immediately after FOSDEM, the largest European gathering of FOSS developers and advocates, which is organized every year at ULB (Brussels Free University) during the coldest weekend of the winter season. The hackfest was attended by over 30 people, equally split between those focused on development and those taking care of non technical tasks such as localization, documentation, certification and marketing. In term of development, there were achievements in various areas of the office suite and in quality assurance.

Hamburg (Germany), April 6-8

The community gathering started with a walk through the fascinating Hanseatic city of Hamburg, with its river, canals and lake in the centre (Binnenalster), and a sample of local food at the Groeninger Privatbrauerei.

On Saturday, around 45 people attended the hackfest, divided in two groups: the first focused on coding for fixing bugs and working on new features, and the second on the meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community. Developers worked on different topics, like making drawing layers ODF conformant, migrating old database to HSQLDB, speeding up VLOOKUP, and improving LibreOffice Viewer on Android, plus other random bits related to bugs, regressions and new features.

German community members discussed about bringing in potential new contributors, developing materials for courses (both online and in schools) about LibreOffice, and creating a new “Get Involved” flyer and page on the website, both in German. And at the end, we relaxed with drinks and food!

Tirana (Albania), September 27

As part of the LibreOffice Conference in Tirana, Albania, this “hacknight” was held at the Destil from 7:30PM to 11PM with over 100 participants, which have covered tasks such as development, localization, documentation, quality assurance, certification and marketing. In fact, the conference brings together a large number of community members from around the globe, and the hackfest is for many contributors the very first opportunity to meet face-to-face after months or even years of interaction on mailing lists and IRC.

Munich (Germany), October 26-28

In late October, CIB hosted a hackfest at modulE in Munich, Germany, with 25 participants over the three days. The meeting started with a few presentations on Friday evening, with Andreas Kainz showing the amazing progress on the NotebookBar design. During the event developers were able to fix several bugs and polish some new features for the upcoming LibreOffice 6.2 major release, while German community members discussed non-technical topics such as marketing and local events. Of course, there was Italian pasta, like in every hackfest in Munich. The meeting ended with a quick city tour and beer at the world-famous Hofbräuhaus.

Undid revision 889701012 by 202.142.113.99 (talk) (-spam)

The Document Foundation has received two different proposals for the organization of LibOCon 2020 from the Turkish and German communities. When this has happened in the past, in 2012 (Berlin vs Zaragoza) and 2013 (Milan vs Montreal), TDF Members have been asked to decide by casting their vote.

This document provides an outline of the two proposals, which are attached in their original format.

TURKEY: ISTANBUL

City. Istanbul, formerly known as Byzantium and Constantinople, is the most populous city in Turkey and the country’s economic, cultural and historic center. Istanbul is a transcontinental city in Eurasia, straddling the Bosporus strait (which separates Europe and Asia) between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea. With a total population of around 15 million residents in its metropolitan area, Istanbul is one of the world’s most populous cities, ranking as the world’s fourth largest city and the largest European city. (Source Wikipedia)

Entity. Tubitak Ulakbim (Pardus) will handle legal and financial responsibilities on behalf of LibreOffice Turkish community. Tubitak Ulakbim is a research institute which support FOSS (mostly Pardus Linux and LibreOffice) and ODF in Turkey, targeting primarily public institutions. Each year, it funds and/or supports many FOSS events in Turkey.
Tubitak Ulakbim (Pardus) has agreed to support the event by covering expenses up to an amount of approximately 25,000 Euro.

Venue. Boğaziçi University (BOUN), İstanbul. The main venue has three conference rooms of different sizes and a foyer area, plus other conference rooms in a nearby building (at walking distance) which can be used in case of need. All conference rooms are in the same campus. Almost all areas in the venue are wheelchair-accessible. BOUN is extremely sensitive to this topic.

Team. Muhammet Kara: main contact. Nurcan Tür, Enes Kıdık, Furkan Tokaç, F. Ahmet Kara, M. Çağrı Dolaz, Ülkem Kasapoğlu, Ömer Çakmak, Doğa Deniz Arıcı, Berkay Aktunç.

We are a group of enthusiast volunteers who love LibreOffice, and would like to see LibreOffice/ODF widely used and known in Turkey, along with other FOSS projects. We see LibOCon as a very good opportunity to integrate the local and the global community, with a positive impact on the local community.

LibOCon2020 Turkey Proposal

GERMANY: NUREMBERG

City. Nuremberg is the second-largest city of the German federal state of Bavaria after its capital Munich, with 511,628 inhabitants in 2016. The city lies about 170 kilometres (110 mi) north of Munich. (Source Wikipedia)

Entity. The organization is lead by the openSUSE community and it’s legally supported by SUSE.

Dates. The proposal is to organize the conference during week 42, from October 12 to October 18, 2020, including internal pre-meetings and conference. The geek number 42 is the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything”.

Venue. Z-Bau, a large building with many rooms of several sizes, and a large outdoor area with a beer garden. With four event rooms, two outdoor areas and various project rooms, there is plenty of room for events of all kinds. The entire area is barrier-free and the various rooms are equipped with basic technical equipment for events and day-to-day operations.

Team. Douglas DeMaio and Marina Latini: main contacts. Andrew Wafaa, Axel Braun, Simon Lees, Christian Boltz, Gertjan Lettink, Richard Brown.

2020 will be an important milestone date for both the LibreOffice and the openSUSE project. LibreOffice will celebrate its 10th birthday while openSUSE will achieve the 15th anniversary of the project. One more notable connection between the two communities is the historically strong relationship between the core LibreOffice development team and SUSE, given that a big number of core developers were all working together at SUSE.

LibOCon2020 Germany Proposal

How does your software affect the autonomy of countries?

Author: Kuan-Ting Lin – click here for part 1

Foreword: the LibreOffice Asia Conference was successfully held in May 2019 in Tokyo. Kuan-Ting Lin, a university student and civic tech reporter also attended this conference and gives his observations here. In Part II, Kuan-Ting starts with the Open Document Format, and expounds on how to form an open government and better autonomy of Taiwan.

The “Taiwanese Language channel” (tâi-gí-tâi) of the Public Television Service (PTS) in Taiwan started its broadcasting service in July 2019. This channel became possible only because the National Languages Act was approved in parliament. This policy was rooted by many in the decision to improve expression, alleviation of limits on speeches, and the consolidation of autonomy following the new law.

After a long-time struggle, the state also sees a silver lining regarding another autonomy issue: document liberation.

What kind of autonomy do we give up for proprietary software?

The LibreOffice Asia Conference held in Tokyo in late May focused on the developments in document liberation in Asian countries. Italo Vignoli, one of the co-founders of The Document Foundation (TDF) that is behind the software, showed a map in a presentation: each country is depicted larger or smaller than its actual size according to its software license trade numbers.

The result was not a surprise: the USA seemed like a giant, while others were squeezed into a bunch of lines. Countries around the globe spend a lot on software licenses – and Taiwan is no exception. Taiwanese people pay tens of billions of New Taiwanese Dollars solely for Microsoft products every year.

Only with respect to trade affairs, Taiwan’s dependency on software products made by single country is damaging its bargaining power and is a threat to economic autonomy. In terms of the autonomy of speech, we are facing an even more serious crisis.

World map for software licenses import. The US becomes an one-pixel wide line between Canada and the Latin America. (Credit: Italo Vignoli)

For thousands of years, our writing and thoughts could only pass on with the help of paper. Then computers replaced paper with digital documents in just a few decades. The difference between paper and digital documents is that the latter are merely some electrical signals which cannot be touched or seen. When users try to open and edit these documents, we need “formats” based on people’s consensus to understand the meanings of different combinations of these electrical signals.

Take “.doc” and “.ppt” files saved by Microsoft Office as examples: these two “formats” are controlled by Microsoft, so it can decide all the rules. The ways to display different fonts, images and languages are Microsoft’s call. As Microsoft Office evolves, paying users may still experience failure to open documents generated by old versions of the software – or see different layouts of the same document in different versions of the software.

In other words, if we do not follow Microsoft’s rules, the appearance of a digital document could alter faster than a piece of paper fades. What you want to say, and how you want your speech to be displayed – the essential freedom of expression and autonomy – are quietly taken away by some companies.

Open format or fake copycat?

To end the domination of formats by Microsoft, some companies, government agencies and communities designed the Open Document Format, or ODF in short, and included a detailed framework of digital document files in it. ODF soon became an ISO standard in 2006. ISO standards are open for everyone to use and are easy to access online, so different developers can all follow them easily. With ODF on the table, we finally came to a consensus on a unified format of documents.

Microsoft joined the party by announcing its “Office Open XML” format and making it another ISO standard in 2008. Having “Office Open XML” in their hands, Microsoft seemed just as open as the ODF. But it didn’t take long for communities to find out that Microsoft wasn’t that open.

The software giant admitted that ordinary users of Microsoft Office save “Office Open XML” files that are not the “strict version” of the format by default. Describing the ISO standard submitted by itself as a “strict version”, and then leading customers to save non-ISO standard files not only make the concept of open standards ironic, but also give people reasons to doubt if the company is really willing to promote open standards.

Franklin Weng, an open standards activist in Taiwan and a board member of TDF also added that some features inside files saved in the so-called “strict version” format in Microsoft products are actually similar to those in “non-strict version” formats. “TDF was studying Office 2016 a couple of years ago. Whether a file is saved as strict OOXML (i.e. Office Open XML) or not, there is no significant difference in terms of file size and lines of XML code.” Therefore, it is debatable how strict the “strict” version claimed by Microsoft actually is.

Length of XML content. As you can see, the XML line numbers of OOXML 2016 Strict and Transitional are nearly the same. What is really saved in OOXML Strict format? (Credit: Italo Vignoli)

Since open formats belong to the public, they has to remain stable and to have a set of progress to review new or modified features, then implement it as a standard extension, thus not matching the style of commercial enterprises, which tend to launch new versions and features frequently in order to stimulate consumption.

Therefore, it is understandable that Microsoft is passive towards promoting open formats. However, for governments and civil society institutions, using a document format with an arbitrary decision-making process, high frequency of change, and non-observance to open standards is definitely not a reasonable policy for documents. It not only leads to more chaos when people exchange files, but also causes more trouble in terms of preserving important information for a long time. Imagine if 500 years in the future, our descendants want to open .docx files from today, yet its complicated document structure doesn’t match the specification Microsoft provides; in that time, there may be no Microsoft engineers able to solve the problems.

A good open format transforms contributions by the community and fuels progress

The monopolised “open format” is regrettable, but the multi-partied ODF format is right here to fix the problem. “ODF is open to many technical companies and communities, and it is more discreet in terms of enacting or revising the standard, which makes immediate and arbitrary changes impossible,” Franklin said.

At the LibreOffice Asia Conference, Mark Hung from Taiwan was invited to give a speech in the opening session keynote. The topic was “LibreOffice CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) Bugs, Fixes and Stories.” Since the majority of the LibreOffice developers are from Europe and South America, the developers, who are usually more familiar with Latin characters, can barely understand the system of logographic scripts and thus are very likely to make some mistakes. Nevertheless, it is at this time that the community can utilise the power of elasticity: the more diverse the cultural backgrounds of participants are, the more easily the problems caused by lack of understanding can be solved.

Mark is exactly such a participant. In 2014, Mark was working for an organisation of around 400 people, and was responsible for transferring the document system to community-developed free software. At first, facing the mistakes in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese characters and Mark’s colleague’s unfamiliarity with new software, Mark gradually developed an operational Q&A to help them solve the problems.

Mark Hung. (Photo credit: Masataka Kondo)

Mark also found out a way to solve a bug that had been disturbing him for a long time. “I was working on a document, and then I thought why not try to look into what’s inside the document? … I decided to try to submit my patch to LibreOffice and to my surprise my patch got reviewed in one day and then it got merged.” Mark therefore became a LibreOffice developer and a community member.

In his five years of volunteering, Mark has dealt with dozens of CJK issues. He even noticed some slight issues, such as the difference between Taiwanese Chinese and Japanese regarding the placement of phonetic markers. Dae-Hyun Sung, another community member from Korea, also showed regional distinction. Dae-Hyun’s presentation mentioned different ways of writing for South and North Korea. These examples show community-driven attempts to include all the differences, instead of limiting the freedom of writing.

Franklin points out that these new features will be treated as extensions first. If they work well then they will be included in a revised ODF format. The whole process ensures that the community’s voice is constantly reflected, and that the versions of the format remain stable.

Shaping a future for governments, free software and open formats to support each other

In Taiwan, ODF is accepted as a national standard of digital documents called ODF-CNS15251. There still are many government agencies and schools that are buying Microsoft Office licenses, but with help from the civil society, the National Development Council has started the “Advancing ODF-CNS15251 to Be the Standard Document Format for the Government” programme, and has been encouraging other parts of the government to replace Microsoft solutions with LibreOffice. The goal of document liberation has transformed from a “mission impossible” to a future that can be expected.

In large companies’ international business strategies, Taiwan is merely a small market and has relatively little attention. But having the opportunity to participate in the development of ODF and LibreOffice, Asian members can finally meet their own needs of document production by themselves. The significance of the LibreOffice Asia conference is that the Asian community has become part of the collective development of LibreOffice.

In Taiwan, facing the native language policies and official documents in the indigenous language programme, Taiwanese people are able to take advantage of the flexibility of LibreOffice to include indigenous languages and other native languages in the software’s built-in dictionary. Native languages can no longer be sacrificed under business interests of companies. And technology can start to be the thing that positively revitalises native languages, instead of the being something that marginalises them.

The National Development Council of Taiwan has started to collaborate with local companies that designed the “NDC ODF Application Tools” based on LibreOffice. But Franklin has a further suggestion: “It’s already a huge leap forward that the National Development Council invested in software development, but I hope they will give some feedback to the community. As for the ODF standard, the government should be part of its making.” The communities alone won’t sustain a proper standard. Having all the benefits of document liberation, the government has obligation to help build a better future. Having a voice in the development of an international standard can also highlight the autonomy that belongs to Taiwanese people.

Thanks to Kuan-Ting Lin for his write-up and perspectives on ODF and LibreOffice in Asia! And on the topic of conferences, everyone is welcome to join our upcoming LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain, from 10 – 13 September. See you there!

Today we’re talking to DaeHyen Sung from our Korean community, about opportunities and challenges for advocating LibreOffice and free software on the Korean peninsular‌

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

So, my surname is Sung, first name is DaeHyun (Korean Hangul notation: ě„ąëŒ€í˜„, Korean Hanja notation: ćˆĺ¤§é‰‰). I’m from the Korean peninsular’s south-east area, Gyeongsang Province (ę˛˝ěƒë„/慜尙道) region, Korea. Now, I live in the south-east side of Seoul (ě„œěš¸).

I’m Korean. My mother tongue is Gyeongsang dialect of Korean. But I can speaks Both Standard Korean [í‘œě¤€ë§ or í‘œě¤€í•œęľ­ě–´/ć¨™ćş–éŸ“ĺœ‹čŞž] and Gyeongsang dialect of Korean [ę˛˝ěƒë„ě‚ŹíˆŹëŚŹ or ę˛˝ěƒë°Šě–¸/慜尙斚言].

My Twitter ID is @studioego, and I’m also on Github: https://github.com/studioego

I contribute to improvements to Korean language support in free/libre open source software (FLOSS), mostly in my spare time. Also, I’m learning East Asian Languages (such as Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese).

This is because, three languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) use Chinese characters 柢字 (also called “ideographs”) and share a similar culture. I am curious as I study the commonalities and differences in the East Asian languages. I also like to visit some historic sites and take pictures in Korea.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

My LibreOffice activities are about improving Korean features, bug reporting (Quality Assurance), translating into Korean, and some other things. Two years ago, I found a bug in LibreOffice’s Korean Hangul/Hanja dictionary. Some Korean Hangul/Hanja dictionary contents are broken on LibreOffice – so I fixed and added content. In addition, I updated the Hangul/Hanja conversion dictionary on LibreOffice.

In Korea, many people have rarely used LibreOffice – so I found many bugs and missing feaatures. So my overall goal is fix and improve Korean languages in LibreOffice.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on in the future?

Along with improving Korean support in LibreOffice, I’d like to do it with other FLOSS projects.

The Korean language (Hangul[í•œę¸€]: í•œęľ­ë§/í•œęľ­ě–´ (these words are used in South Korea ), 쥰선말/쥰선어 (these words are used in North Korea ), 우댏말 (this word is used neutrally in both Koreans and bt Korean expats, it literally means “our language”); Hanja[í•œěž/柢字]: éŸ“ĺœ‹ë§/ćœéŽŽë§/éŸ“ĺœ‹čŞž/ćœéŽŽčŞž) is an East Asian language spoken by about 80 million people.

It is the official and national language of both Koreas: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), with different standardized official forms used in each territory. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture (연변 쥰선쥹 ěžěš˜ěŁź/ĺťśé‚ŠćœéŽŽć—č‡Şć˛ťĺˇž/ĺťśčžšćœé˛œć—č‡Şć˛ťĺˇž) and Changbai Korean Autonomous County (잼밹 쥰선쥹 ěžěš˜í˜„/é•ˇç™˝ćœéŽŽć—č‡Şć˛ťç¸Ł/é•żç™˝ćœé˛œć—č‡Şć˛ťĺŽż) of the People’s Republic of China [ä¸­čŻäşşć°‘ĺ…ąĺ’Œĺœ‹, Mainland China]. It is also used in Japan, Uzbekistan, Russia [it reads â€œĐšĐžŃ€Ń‘ ĐźĐ°Ń€â€ in Russian], Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.

Also, the Korean language uses Chinese characters (柢字). It means “Sino-Korean vocabulary” or â€œí•œěžě–´(柢字語/Hanja-eo)” in Korean. It is similar to Japanese Kanji [ćź˘ĺ­—ă‹ă‚“ă˜]. So when you’re working on FLOSS, you have to consider both Chinese and Japanese as well as Korean and vice versa.

In future, If I have time, I want to do more research about the differences in Korean languages in South Korea and North Korea .

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the experience like?

In 2017, I visited Taiwan’s FLOSS Conference, COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) as the Korean FLOSS Contributor.

At that time, I had already contributed Linux character maps applications – both GNOME (gucharmap) and KDE (kcharselect). Then I attended COSCUP at National Taiwan University, in Taipei, Taiwan, and in 2017, I met TDF board members Italo Vignoli and Taiwan’s TDF members, Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang. I also met a Japanese TDF member, Naruoka Ogasawara. When I watched Italo Vignoli’s presentation, it had a strong impression on me.

Then, Jeff Huang [Po-Yen Huang] invited me to the LibreOffice CJK Telegram group. So I joined the LibreOffice project in 2017. At that time, I installed and used LibreOffice for the first time. (When I was University student, I was used to OpenOffice. However, its compatibility was very low, so I had stop to using it.)

Last year, I met many of TDF members and Asian LibreOffice users in places such as Taiwan, Japan, Indonesian, Mainland China, etc. In February 2018, I met Japanese TDF member, Jun Nogata with KDE board member “Eike Hein”, KDE Korea members in Seoul. At that time, really I felt Jun Nogata’s passions for FLOSS.

Then, In August 2018, I heard and watched KDE Akademy 2018’s keynote. The keynote’s main topics were North Korea, FOSS in Both Koreas (North and South). In his keynote slide, he talked about Korean Expat challenges in Korea for using FOSS (for example, Korean input, fonts, banking, online transactions [maybe, Microsoft ActiveX technology is popular in Korea], and HWP [Hangul Word processor] files).

I think, In Korea, Microsoft’s product-friendly computing environment and proprietary software is popular (such as HWP), so many Koreans and expats in Korea think ALL FOSS is difficult to use. (Also, I personally feel that it is difficult to use FLOSS in Korea.)

In the presentation, I saw North Korea’s Linux distribution, Red Star OS (it’s based on KDE). Also, when I installed Red Star OS, I checked the office suite and found that it’s based on OpenOffice. In my opinion, Because of North Korea’s economic senctions, North Korean people mainly use FLOSS. I found the bugs in Red Star’s office suite – so I thought, I would have to work hard on the LibreOffice project.

Also, when I attended COSCUP, GNOME.Asia and openSUSE Asia summit 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan, I met other TDF members from Asia (such as LibreOffice Taiwan Team, Japan Team, Indonesia Team, etc). Then I met LibreOffice Indonesia team members at LibreOffice Asia Meetup in A+A Space, Taipei. I was impressed by the enthusiasm of Indonesian open source users and contributors to open source.

Also, In December, 2018, I attended Japanese meetups: OSC 2018 Fukuoka and the 8th Kyushu LibreOffice study meetup [珏8ĺ›žäšĺˇžLibreOffice勉埡䟚]. I met three contributors from Africa who are currently living in Japan. First time, I’m curious about African Open Source Contributors. Also I felt even more passion for FLOSS.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice? What does it need most?

If LibreOffice does not have feature enhancements for Korean users, I think that using the ODF format and document liberation movements in Korea will be impossible. Also the future for LibreOffice is not good regarding the Korean language. In Korea, the HWP format is still widely used HWP – and the share of Microsoft doc formats is still low. HWP format is the de facto standard official document format for the public sector and schools in Korea.
OpenOffice and LibreOffice can only open HWP files only if they were created with Hangul ’97 – newer versions of HWP files cannot be opened with these applications.

Recently, the government of the Republic of Korea Government announced that they will “use ODF insteadd of the HWP format”. But it’s only a slogan – and they only use draft documents officially on web-based document management systems. When I read the article, ”Taiwanese government standardises on true ODF document format”, I really admired the Taiwanese FLOSS activists and contributors.

Thanks DaeHyun Sung! And to everyone reading this: you can also give our community a hand and help to spread the word about free software and open standards. See our “What Can I Do For LibreOffice” site to get started!

Free And Open Source Software (FOSS) Is Gradually Developing Its Commercial Ecosystems In Asia

Author: Kuan-Ting Lin
Translator: Franklin Weng

Foreword: the LibreOffice Asia Conference was successfully held in May 2019 in Tokyo. Kuan-Ting Lin, a university student and civic tech reporter also attended this conference and gives his observations here. In Part I, Kuan-Ting provides readers who are not familiar with FOSS, the Open Document Format (ODF) and LibreOffice a view about how FOSS communities work, and how FOSS grows its business opportunities and ecosystems.

On June 18, 2019, almost all of the government agencies in Taiwan’s cabinet received an official document from the National Development Council (NDC). “When exchanging digital documents between government agencies, the file format used shall be the Open Document Format (ODF) if the transferred files are editable‌ Do not use proprietary editors to directly save as ODF files‌ It is highly recommended to use the NDC ODF Application Tools or LibreOffice to generate standard ODF files.”

“This is the most exciting and cheering official document in recent years!” said Dr. Chao-Kuei Hung, a Science and Technology Studies (STS) researcher and inveterate FOSS promoter. In the document, users in Taiwan government agencies are asked to not use proprietary office suites like Microsoft Office to generate documents, and therefore not save and spread “.doc” or “.docx” format files, which people are quite familiar with.

Instead, they are asked to use free and open source software – which lets people to download, research, improve and redistribute it – like LibreOffice. They need to save and transfer documents in ODF format, which is an ISO standard (see the upcoming part II of the report for details). For most people, this seems to be a confusing policy; however, it will surely affect our lives in the future. For us, it is even as important as metric units like kilograms or meters.

In 50 Years, From Microsoft To Communities, There Are Huge Software Ecosystem Changes In The Taiwanese Government

The story begins more than 50 years ago. In the late 1960s, the Taiwanese central government introduced the first batch of computers for tax data registration. This purchase started the era of Taiwan’s digital government. With the increasing burden of people using computers, the government had been constantly buying and installing huge numbers of Microsoft product licenses, the majority of which were Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Such unrestrained purchasing and use of Microsoft software had made the government a subject of criticism by the parliament and the supervisory court more than a decade ago.

Legislators held a press conference in 2002 to question the administrative system, and pointed out that the Ministry of Justice had “illegally allowed Microsoft’s bid rigging”. At the time, Minister Ding-nan Chen replied that he would “wait for other software to achieve a certain degree of universality and compatibility,” and then the Ministry of Justice “would not rule out considering adopting it”, which clearly suggested that options other than Microsoft were simply not sufficient for the government at that time.

The fact that the Taiwanese government’s editorial policy changed from the early conservative mentality to today’s announcement of abandoning Microsoft’s commercial solutions proves that a free and open source office suite, developed by the community, has already been able to establish its own “ecosystem”. Companies in different fields in this ecosystem provide various government information services, while meeting the government’s high requirements for stability and security. However, here is an interesting question: Aren’t FOSS community members against the concept of commercial companies and software? Why do they set up their own company in the ecosystem?

The Formation of a FOSS Ecosystem

Let’s get back to the end of May 2019. Many LibreOffice community members gathered together in Tokyo to attend the first LibreOffice Asia Conference, and discuss how LibreOffice – which was born and grown up in Europe – could develop in Asia, where the culture and policies are quite different.

Franklin Weng from Taiwan, the only Asian member in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation (TDF) – the legal charity entity behind LibreOffice – was there too. Franklin has been deeply involved in the Taiwanese FOSS community, and is also one of the founding members of Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT). In early years he simply contributed and promoted FOSS in government agencies and schools as a volunteer community member. Nevertheless, through these years he realized that it wasn’t enough. “Business and policies needs to push each other. Now LibreOffice and ODF are slowly moving toward this direction: Policy goes first, and then gradually forms the business model.”

Franklin started his own business a few years ago, which helps the public sector and other organizations to adopt FOSS solutions. Through the community’s connections and long-term accumulated trust, Franklin’s team has successfully co-worked with the National Development Council (NDC), the Yilan County Government, and many other central agencies in the Taiwanese government to provide training courses and consulting services.

The lecturers who work with Franklin are mostly freelancers and are also involved in the FOSS community as deeply as he is. Therefore, besides teaching skills for using LibreOffice, the lecturers would also share free software concepts and issues with users from government agencies.

The integrity of FOSS ecosystems also depends on the integration of other fields. Shigenobu Koufugata, a member of the Japanese community who lives in Chiba, Japan, purchases old computers, installs high-performance, low-cost free software, and then resells the renovated solutions to consumers.

Users of second-hand computers often lack certain computer knowledge. Therefore, if they can use the computers straight after buying them, they can avoid the high threshold of downloading and installing additional software. Shigenobu believes that this can naturally attract more users to try LibreOffice.

In addition to software training and hardware support, software development is of course indispensable to the ecosystem. Italo Vignoli, one of the co-founders of TDF, stated clearly: “Our main assets are developers.” LibreOffice has hundreds of developers since everyone can participate; however more than half of the development contributions are made by employees of companies such as Collabora, CIB and Red Hat. By developing the required features or customized versions of LibreOffice for customers, these companies can direct profits and feedback to the community at the same time.

The Open Source Software Integral Institute (OSSII) in Taiwan is one of the few companies that provides LibreOffice business services in the Chinese-language area. One of its products is the “NDC ODF Application Tools” – a customized LibreOffice designed for users in the Taiwanese government – provided by the NDC in Taiwan. The CPC Corporation, Taiwan, a large state-owned enterprise (around 16,000 employees) with 73 years of history, is one of their customers.

At the LibreOffice Asia Conference, Mr. Wen-ke Huang, an employee in CPC who is responsible for the infrastructure information systems and ODF adoption, shared his experiences and analyzed the reasons and methods for adopting ODF and NDC ODF Application Tools.

In contrast to Microsoft’s ecosystem, where companies are mainly selling licenses and external add-ons, FOSS allows anyone to contribute code and even publish their own customized versions. This enables community members to participate into the core aspects of software development. Besides, the growing demands for FOSS application training and second-hand hardware also encourages community members who are expert in different fields to join the ecosystem.

Commercial Company That Is Loyal To The Community

Unlike normal commercial software companies, FOSS-related companies would keep thinking about their responsibilities as members of the community while making a profit. Making money is one thing, but since the community is the original motivation of the company’s founding, the two must cooperate with each other.

The first LibreOffice Asia Conference follows this thought. “I asked the Japanese community about hosting the first LibreOffice Asia Conference, because I found that they have a very good and active community, and hence can go further to find appropriate business models,” said Franklin. “When I attended LibreOffice Kaigi or similar events in Japan and presented what we have done in Taiwan, they always showed their envy and said that it was very difficult to promote LibreOffice and ODF in Japan. However I think that they’re doing very well; they just need to start thinking and finding more business opportunities. So the topic of the first LibreOffice Asia Conference was business. I hoped that after the discussions in the business workshop and certification interview, they have more confidence to start moving to business.”

“Running an FOSS-related company gives me not only the ability to contribute without any worries in the community, but also to find business opportunities for other community members from our experience, and to use the operating principles to consolidate the FOSS ecosystem on the ground,” Franklin explained additionally.

Although commercial companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem can contribute to the community while having profits, the relationship between the company and community is not one-way assistance. Sometimes it can be tough if the relationship between the two is not good.

An obvious example is the former OpenOffice.org community and Oracle. A few years beforehand, Oracle acquired Sun and hence a large amount of OpenOffice.org’s development fell into Oracle’s hands. It was dangerous because Oracle has never been friendly to FOSS, so some core OpenOffice.org community members decided to fork LibreOffice and founded The Document Foundation. “That’s why they chose a foundation as the form of the organization. TDF emphasizes the independence of the organization, very much due to the previous troubles with Oracle,” said Franklin.

Italo described the differences between the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice communities. “We reverted the paradigm,” said Italo. “This is OpenOffice, the company protects the project. So it’s like when it rains, if you are under the umbrella you don’t get wet. We reverted the umbrella (for LibreOffice), and this is the concept of the mixing bowl‌ We jump into a bowl and we have every one of us moving in the same direction.”

The independence of the community is not only reflected in the organizational form. Although the development work is mainly carried out by commercial companies, TDF still dominates and makes decisions about the direction of the community and software development.

In order to maintain this independence and avoid conflicts of interests, the statues of TDF stipulates that the composition of the Board of Directors and Membership Committees must not have more than one-third of its members belonging to a single company or organization. With such rigorous management, communities and companies can find the right balance for each other.

Ideals And Business Can Cooperate Through Certification

At the end of the LibreOffice Asia Conference, the TDF’s Certification Committee held a public interview with several candidates from Taiwan and Japan. As long as these candidates were approved by the committee, they would become “LibreOffice Certified Professional Trainers”, which implies the expert skills and abilities to teach LibreOffice; or “LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals”, to assist organizations to adopt and migrate to LibreOffice.

For TDF, these certified migration professionals and professional trainers are important ways to promote the concept and develop business. “I invited the LibreOffice Certification Committee to attend this conference and talk about business. I hope to discuss with the community about what can be done, and what can be noticed when training,” said Franklin, who has been a certified migration professional and professional trainer since 2016.

Eric Sun, a TDF member and a candidate in the certification interview this time, won unanimous approvals from the committee and became a certified migration professional and professional trainer. Eric used to work in the Open Source Software Application Consulting Center (OSSACC), a project under SLAT, to promote FOSS and public domain educational resources in schools. He then co-worked with Franklin to promote ODF/LibreOffice and has been the ace lecturer in Franklin’s team. Becoming certified by TDF can no doubt bring him more credits and opportunities, both for business and for promoting FOSS.

LibreOffice will be ten years old next year. TDF was founded in the shadow of a large commercial company at that time, but those members who set up the foundation may not have expected that the seed of document liberation and LibreOffice can be spread across the sea, to the distant lands in Asia, and set roots in the ground there, with a philosophy of equal emphasis on ideals and profits.

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Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project last four weeks – click the links to learn more!

• ODF (the Open Document Format) is the native file format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open and standardised format, ideal for long-term document storage. At the start of the month, we announced COSM – the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers, to hold funds and to retain editors to work at the ODF Technical Committee. The goal is to accelerate development of the standard, and build up experienced editors. Find out more here.

• We put the next part of our Annual Report 2018 online! Our native language communities around the world help to improve LibreOffice and share knowledge – and their passion and dedication is wonderful. LibreOffice wouldn’t be what it is today without their great work!

• On July 4th, we announced LibreOffice 6.2.5. This includes 118 bugfixes, thanks to our worldwide community and ecosystem of certified developers.

• Meanwhile, work continues on LibreOffice 6.3 (due to be released in early August), and our QA community organised a Bug Hunting Session. Give us a hand in future sessions to ensure that LibreOffice stays rock-solid!

• We talked to Jun Nogata, who helps out with the Japanese Ask LibreOffice website, and is also involved in marketing and public relations for the Japanese community.

• Got some C++ knowledge? Want to explore the LibreOffice source code? We posted a guide to building the suite on Windows (as a follow up to our tutorial for GNU/Linux).

• We already mentioned ODF earlier in this recap – well, also in July, we chatted to Regina Henschel about how the Open Document Format is developed, and how everyone can get involved.

• Later in the month, we put another part of the Annual Report 2018 online: LibreOffice development. Check it out for a behind-the-scenes look at LibreOffice 6.2’s development process!

• Members of the Canadian LibreOffice community set up LibreWaterloo, to improve their presence on the local scene.

• On July 24th, TDF announced that the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has joined the project’s Advisory Board. Back in 2014, the UK Cabinet Office announced the selection of the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing and viewing government documents, so it’s good to have GDS on board to further the adoption of open standards.

• Finally, we reported back from the first LibreOffice Latin America Conference. It was a great success, and achieved important community milestones.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Linguistic challenges, women’s participation in FOSS, interoperability, professional training, migration, scripting and much more were hot topics in the conference held at the Facultad Politecnica of the Universidad Nacional de Asunción, Paraguay.

By Daniel A. Rodriguez.

The event started internally on Thursday 18 with a translation sprint of the LibreOffice Guarani team, with the assistance of Olivier Hallot (Brazil), LibreOffice volunteer translator for Brazilian Portuguese.

The Conference opened to public on Friday 19 in a ceremony that gathered the Minister of the Secretariat of Linguistic Policies (SPL), Ladislaa Alcaraz de Silvero, Prof. Limpia Ferreira Ortiz, FP-UNA Vice-Dean, members of the GuaranĂ­ Culture Atheneum, Prof. Mag. Alcides Torres Gutt, Coordinator of the Translation Team together with Italo Vignoli and Gustavo Pacheco representing The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice Community.

“The LibreOffice Latin American Conference is an event not only of technology, it is also a space for the study of new forms of productive organization. It will deal with technical topics such as development and quality control, but also with successful cases of migration and, with special attention, the translation into GuaranĂ­, native of the American continent and official in Paraguay,” said the Vice-dean in her inaugural speech.

The conference initiative was declared of “Scientific and Technological Interest” by the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay.

This regional conferences were carried out for 8 years in Europe and other continents, and for this time Paraguay was chosen as the venue, because it has a vibrant Free Software community, a special interest for the GuaranĂ­ language, and was completely organized by volunteers. Talks and workshops were held by speakers, members of the LibreOffice community, from Italy, Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, from Thursday 18 to Saturday 20 of July at the Polytechnic Faculty of the National University of Asuncion in San Lorenzo campus.

The first presentations covered the Hispanic community, the reality of the companies linked to the FLOSS in Paraguay and the difficulties faced by women workforce in the technological field. An official photo of the participants followed.

Starting the afternoon Henry Castro (Bolivia) talked on the development and technical challenges of LibreOffice Online. He was followed by JosĂŠ Gattica (Chile) talk on “Migration to LibreOffice in a vulnerable school”. Simultaneously, Mauricio Baeza (Mexico) gave the workshop on macros in the computer lab.

Xiomara CĂŠspedes talked about the migration to LibreOffice and open document formats at the University of Costa Rica. She was followed by Renato Barsotti (Argentina) experience of the Faculty of Economics of the National University of Misiones (UnaM).

The next day morning, Olivier Hallot (Brazil) shared with the attendees the details about the importance of documenting the software. Simultaneously, Klaibson Ribeiro (Brazil) conducted the Calc workshop.

Italo Vignoli (Italy) talked about the characteristics of the LibreOffice community on a global scale, presenting graphs and figures to support the features and trends of the people involved in LibreOffice. He was followed after lunch by Xisco Fauli (Spain) on LibreOffice Development and Quality Control. At the same time, the certification team reviewed and approved the application of Rute Solipa (Portugal) for Professional Instructor and Xiomara CĂŠspedes (Costa Rica) as Certified Migration Consultant in a video call session with Lothar Becker (Germany), Italo Vignoli and Gustavo Pacheco.

Italo Vignoli returned to give two presentations, the first one explaining the certification policy of The Document Foundation and the second one addressing the importance of adopting and using open documents formats such as the ODF standard.

The conference ended with the testimony of the participating students and the general public about the personal gains from the themes and knowledge presented at the conference and, in particular, the individual commitment to create a genuinely Paraguayan LibreOffice community and focus on LibreOffice translated into guarani.

Berlin, July 22, 2019 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has joined the project’s Advisory Board, effective immediately.

The Government Digital Service (GDS) is part of the UK Cabinet Office [1]. It leads the digital transformation of Government in the UK, helping people interact with government more easily and supporting government to operate more effectively and efficiently.

In July 2014, the UK Cabinet Office announced the selection of the Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing and viewing government documents.

The Open Standards Team within GDS support and encourage the use of open standards in government. Their aim is to help identify and contribute to open standards for software interoperability and to promote data formats that will help to meet user needs across the UK government and support the delivery of common components.

“GDS has been a long-term supporter of the adoption of Open Document Format, and their participation in the TDF Advisory Board represents a strong endorsement of the project’s commitment to the advancement of open standards and ODF”, says Simon Phipps, TDF Director.

John Strudwick, Interim Director for Service Design and Assurance at GDS, said: “GDS are delighted to have joined the Advisory Board of TDF. We believe that open standards are important in meeting the needs that users have of Government and that ODF plays a big role in helping to deliver this.”

TDF Advisory Board’s (AB) [2] primary function is to represent supporters of the project, and to provide the Board of Directors (BoD) with advice and guidance. In addition, the AB is at the kernel of the LibreOffice ecosystem, and as such is key to the further development of the project.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/cabinet-office
[2] https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/

Regina Henschel is a long-time member of the LibreOffice community, and has worked on ODF, the native file format of the suite. At our recent German community meetup, we talked to her about how ODF is developed, and how users can help to improve it…

Tell us a bit about ODF, and why it’s important…

Open Document Format is LibreOffice’s native file format. (If you have a file with a .odt, .ods, .odp or .odg extension, then it’s an Open Document Text, Spreadsheet or Presentation file or Graphic respectively.)

ODF is developed by OASIS, then submitted to ISO (the International Organization for Standardization), and then adopted as a standard. There is also a working group at ISO, which by the way also works on OOXML – which can then ask questions about development, and so on.

For ODF we are now working on version 1.3. We had a “feature freeze” last summer. We have come so far that everything we wanted to have in it is available in the “editor version”. Now we’re going to fine-tune it, then we’ll be back in summer – so that was a whole year. Then comes the coordination process at OASIS, so it usually takes two years until a new version of the standard is ready.

How do you decide which new features to add?

The feature has to be well defined, and that depends a little on how good the proposal you get is. There are some suggestions like: “We want to have a feature for Fourier transformations” – but nothing else! And then we say: as long as there is no implementation that actively handles it, we’ll postpone it for later. It’s not worth it, for a standards body to deal with a proposal like this, if there are no applications that are actually interested in it.

ODF exists as a “strict” standard, for features that are fully standardized, and then there is an “extended mode” in which you can try out new features in applications. They then run under their own namespace, and if that works, organizations can make a suggestion for OASIS, eg: “This feature works well for us, so please include this in the strict standard.”

Then others can say: “Yes, we want to do something similar, but it would be better for us if we didn’t call it X, but Y instead”. Or: “We need an additional attribute to make it work for us”, for example. In situations like that, the proposals are discussed.

For example, in LibreOffice, it’s now possible to specify the size of charts, independent of their labels. In the old standard, you could only set the size including the label. This means that when data changed and the label changed, the effect was that the size of the chart changed. So that’s been fixed in ODF 1.3.

There are also bugfixes, where there are things that are simply wrong, or that are not clear enough for implementation. For example, one thing that was really incorrect was to put the units “at” and “atm” on the same level – that was definitely wrong. And one time, a matrix form was wrong as well. So we work on fixes for these.

Can normal end-users help out?

Yes, you can be a “normal person”, so to speak, without being on any committee – you can still send something to the Technical Committee. There is a mailing list, and also a homepage, where you can get informed about the work of the committee. There you can also find a link to the mailing list – but you have to register, because of spam. Messages on this list are then read and answered by the Committee.

The second way to get involved is when the Committee is about to make a new version of ODF. This will then be made available for voting – and then there will be an official time for comments. There the regulations are a bit stricter; this is not voluntary, but the committee has to actually work on these comments. That should then give a qualified answer.

The next step where official participation takes place is at ISO. They have the same disclosure process again, where comments are collected accordingly. Then the Technical Committee gets a long list from ISO: “We have received these comments, please discuss them.”

So this is a process that is very open. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to join the Committee. It’s not that something happens in secret, and then suddenly there’s a standard – but rather, the process is totally comprehensible.

The other thing that interested people can see is the archives of the mailing lists – and there are weekly teleconferences too.

Thanks to Regina for all her help over the years! ODF – and other open standards – are incredibly important, especially for long-term data storage. Indeed, the UK government recommends using ODF, and has guidelines for using the format in organisations and companies. Also check out this presentation from Regina at FOSDEM 2018.

Community is awesome! By helping to translate and market LibreOffice around the world, native language projects bring enthusiasm and passion to the global community. Here’s what they did in 2018, taken from our Annual Report…

Albania – OSCAL

OSCAL is the annual international Open Source Free Software Conference in Albania dedicated to empowering Software Freedom, Open Knowledge, Free Culture and Decentralization. In 2018, some team, Membership Committee and Board members attended the event to meet local community members and discuss plans for the upcoming LibreOffice Conference 2018 (which is covered elsewhere in this report).

Austria – event

The GNU/LinuxDay event took place in Dornbirn, Vorarlberg, on 13th of October. Community members from LibreOffice and The Document Foundation were present, including Christian Lohmeier, Marina Latini, Florian Effenberger and Robert Einsle. They had a booth with various materials, and talked to visitors.

Brazil – documentation

In January, the Brazilian community announced the availability of the Getting Started Guide 5.2, with all innovations and enhancements from LibreOffice 5.2. The guide was an in-depth update of the 5.0 Getting Started Guide that was already translated into Brazilian Portuguese. The translation team was composed of IT professionals, translators, engineers, teachers and technicians: Chrystina Pelizer, Vera Cavalcante, Fábio Coelho, Túlio Macedo, Raul Pacheco da Silva, Valdir Barbosa and Olivier Hallot.

Cuba – Document Freedom Day

In April, The Document Foundation supported the Cuban LibreOffice community, represented by Carlos Parra Zaldivar, for Document Freedom Day 2018 in Holguín, on the opening day of the International Book Exhibition in the local library Biblioteca Provincial “Alex Urquiola”. LibreOffice is included in the Cuban GNU/Linux distribution Nova, and as such is part of the IT syllabus in all schools.

Cyprus – events

During the last weekend of the year (December 28-30), there was a series of events at Middle East Technical University Northern Cyprus Campus, organized by the METU NCC ACM Student Chapter. Most of the attendees were from the Computer Engineering department. All attendees completed the “getting started” part of LibreOffice development, while some of them submitted their patches to Gerrit, and some began preparing to do so.

Czech Republic – LinuxDays and OpenAlt

Zdeněk Crhonek and Stanislav Horáček attended the two biggest Czech FOSS events, LinuxDays in Prague and OpenAlt in Brno. There was generally positive feedback from users, interest in new features and what is going on. Also, there was discussion with someone from the National Technical Library in Prague (who enthusiastic about FOSS, migrated client computers to Linux and LibreOffice, and encouraging us to spread the word about it) and a representative of an organization trying to coordinate using FOSS in Czech municipalities (two towns running LibreOffice, with the intention to pay for some bug fixing).

Other meetups took place at these events: a meeting with the Slovak community (Miloš Šrámek and Andrej Kapuš) in Brno, a meeting with the Czech localization community (Mozilla, Linux distributions), discussing mainly the possibility of a new Czech dictionary, and a discussion with a marketing specialist who suggested ways to simplify the LibreOffice web page.

Apart from events, the Czech community worked continuous localization of LibreOffice’s user interface, website, help and marketing materials (press releases, video subtitles). There was also user support and moderation on the Czech “Ask LibreOffice” site.

France – workshops

The French community organised workshops for documentation, QA, and localisation. Inno³ kindly supported one workshop by hosting the community at ‘Le 137’, a coworking space near Gare du Nord in Paris. Participants gathered at a restaurant near there and then went to work all together on QA and localisation. They worked on fixing bugs and localising LibreOffice Online.

Germany – meetup, calls and events

Christian Lohmeier (LibreOffice’s release manager) and Mike Saunders (Marketing & PR) attended the Augsburger Linux-Infotag in southern Germany in April. They set up a booth which had a screen showing a video of LibreOffice 6.0, along with stickers and flyers encouraging people to get involved with the project. Mike gave a talk in German called “LibreOffice: where we’re from, where we’re going, and how to get involved”.

Up in northern Germany, the community had a meetup in Hamburg to discuss various ideas and issues in the project, such as attending more conferences in the German-speaking region, with a more targeted focus. For instance, instead of simply telling people what LibreOffice is (which most Linux users already know), the focus should be more clearly on bringing in potential new contributors. Some some “action items” were also defined, including the creation of a new “Get involved” flyer for events, and a German translation of the “Get involved” page on the website.

On November 13th, Florian Effenberger gave a presentation about The Document Foundation at HTW Dresden – a university for technical and scientific studies. This was part of a series of talks about free and open source software.

In addition, the German community organised regular calls (TelKos) to discuss upcoming events and ways to spread awareness about LibreOffice.

India – localisation sprint

Ten people participated in a localisation sprint in Kolkata, on November 11. Participants made contributions together for the Bengali-India locale. On November 4, there was pre-meetup on localisation portal basics: Biraj Karkamar gave the participants basic details on how to add suggestions and submissions in the portal. Also that day, participants created their profiles on the portal.

The main event started with introductions, then they had a short recap on the pre-meetup. Following that was hands-on portal. Biraj showed the style guide of the bn-IN locale translation, which is followed in open source localisation. Then the sprint started, which was almost five hours long. Biraj summed it up with: “it was good and productive. Of course, it was fun too!”

Indonesia – conference

The Indonesian community organised a conference about LibreOffice on March 25 and 26. It was hosted by Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya (PENS), and was first of its kind in South East Asia. On the day before the conference, the Indonesian LibreOffice community organized a localization workshop, led by Andika Triwidada, a long-time contributor who has coordinated the Indonesian localization for many years.

On the first day of the conference, in the morning. there was a meeting with a group of PENS’ IT professors, led by the university dean, where discussions took place about the opportunity of increasing the presence of open source software in their syllabus. In addition, the university is going to evaluate the migration to open source software and LibreOffice, including the migration to ODF as a way to overcome vendor’s lock-in.

Italy – conference and schools

Associazione LibreItalia, representing the Italian LibreOffice community, organized several events targeted at students – from primary schools up to universities – to educate them about free open source software and open document standards, and support the concept of “digital citizenship”. Several community members have been active in Northern and Central Italy, and have also targeted their communication efforts to parents.

In November, the community met in Sanremo for the fifth LibreItalia Conference, to discuss past activities and arrange new ones. The event was also an opportunity to meet the President of PA Social, the association representing social media managers of Italian public administrations, to talk about potential collaboration opportunities.

Japan – conference and meeting

On 13th December, at the Yahoo! Lodge (1-3, Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo), LibreOffice community members who are usually far away from one another met up for a chance to interact. At this event, participants had a question-and-answer session about translations, discussed some other topics, and prepared slides for the following day. Attendees included: Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki, Masaki Murakami Tomas Kapiye (from Namibia), Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi (Rwanda), Hatem Wasfy (Egypt) Rin Nakamura and Atsushi Ueda.

On the following day, the LibreOffice Japanese team did a seminar. This time, the speakers were Tomas Kapiye, Dieudonne Dukuzumuremyi and Hatem Wasfy. One of the talks was about “How African students contribute to LibreOffice”.

During the year, Japanese community members contributed articles to websites and online magazines about their events, and new versions of LibreOffice.

Nepal – localisation sprint

The Nepalese LibreOffice community spent much of April 2018 localising the software, and at the end of the month, they had a meetup together with the Kathmandu University Open Source Club. For translations of LibreOffice, participants reduced the number of critical error strings from over 9000 down to 3808, while LibreOffice Online was completely localised during this event. In addition, the number of active contributors increased from 2 to 35. At the end of the event, participants received a certificate, thanking them for their help.

Hispanic community – Telegram channel

Many local LibreOffice communities have Telegram channels for communication. The Spanish Telegram channel was featured in MuyLinux online magazine; this brought a sizeable influx of new members and traffic.

Taiwan – meetup and Bug Hunting Session

A meetup was held in the evening on 11 August in A+A space, which is a nice and friendly space for FOSS communities, and also a community made up of several artists who use FOSS as their tools to create their artwork. The attendees included LibreOffice and other FOSS community members from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan. Franklin Weng introduced the 30-second animation for LibreOffice Android Viewer, which was generated by LibreOffice Taiwan and A+A Space.

Rania Amina, who was responsible for visual design in the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, showed his artwork to attendees, while Ahmad Haris also shared his experiences holding LibreOffice Conference Indonesia, which was a huge success. Shinji Enoki described the current status of Japanese support in LibreOffice, and many events held in Japan. Daehyun Sung introduced himself and shared some interesting things in Korea.
After this, attendees split into different groups and talked with each other. During this meetup, members from Japan and Indonesia showed interest in holding a LibreOffice Asia Conference. Besides conferences, attendees also exchanged experiences migrating to LibreOffice in organizations and public administrations.

On November 29, the Taiwanese community held a three-hour “LibreOffice Bug Triage Experience” event. A total of 70 students from National Cheng-Kung University and three members of The Document Foundation (Franklin Weng, Cheng-Chia Tseng and Jeff Huang) attended. First, Franklin introduced Bugzilla and the bug issue lifecycle. In this event the participants installed the daily build master version of LibreOffice and focused on three things: testing new reports, confirming bugs, and reproducing issues.
Students searched for these three kinds of bugs and randomly chose one to examine. The three TDF members helped and guided students during the whole session. In a short time, students found that it was a lot easier than they expected, so they were quite happy, excited and confident. The organisers estimate that in total, more than 100 bugs were confirmed/reported as not reproducible.

Turkey – events, Bug Hunting Sessions and training

In May, members of the Turkish community attended the Free Software and Linux Days 2018 in Istanbul. They had a booth, jointly run by LibreOffice Turkey and GNOME Turkey community members. During the event they gave out stickers to the visitors, and answered their questions about LibreOffice, GNOME, and Free/Libre Software in general. Community members also had a lot of time to chat, and to discuss the current situation and the future of the community in Turkey. Also at the event, attendees gave three talks: Being a LibreOffice Developer, LibreOffice Certifications, and The Open Document Format.

A couple of months later, the community organised a Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1 Release Candidate 1, to find and fix issues before the final release in early August. Around 15 people were present, and they tested LibreOffice for three hours. Multiple bugs were discovered – some were reported, some were discussed, others were prepared for reports later. After the session, there was a long discussion about community and ecosystem building for LibreOffice in Turkey.

A second Bug Hunting Session took place in Ankara in November: eight people (including one remotely from Istanbul) participated in the live session, and participants tested LibreOffice 6.2 Alpha on Linux, Windows and macOS. The event started with self-introductions, and participants chatted for a short while, to get to know each other. Then Muhammet Kara, the organiser, went through the bug reporting and QA process briefly, and introduced the participants to LibreOffice’s Bugzilla installation. Several bugs were identified, and bug reports were created for them.

Lastly, Gökhan Gurbetoğlu organised some LibreOffice training in October. It was a two-day event and took place in İstanbul, as part of the Open Source in Public Institutions Conference’s local sessions (Kamu Açık Kaynak Konferansı). There were 25 trainees on both days; the first day started with a quick introduction to LibreOffice’s interface and continued with Writer. Then the second day was for Calc.

USA – OSCON

OSCON is the largest open source conference and exhibition in the United States. The event returned to Portland to celebrate its 20th anniversary in July, after a couple of years in Austin, Texas. The Document Foundation was given a free booth in the Non Profit Pavilion, and was represented by three enthusiastic volunteers – Robinson Tryon and Robin Haberman from the US, and Eric Bright from Canada – who had lots of good conversations with everyone from long-term users and supporters of LibreOffice, to those who were new to the whole concept of FOSS.

Wrapping up…

Of course, this report contains just a selection of native language project achievements in 2018 – so TDF would like to say a big thank you to everyone, across the planet, who is helping to make powerful productivity tools available to everyone, regardless of their location or mother tongue. Cheers!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2017, contributors to the Open Document Format (ODF) specification at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) noted that while the Technical Committee continues to generate changes, the integration of these changes – a substantial task, which is key for the future of the ODF standard – is only being conducted on a volunteer basis.

To support current adoptions of the ODF standard format by governments and enterprises and potential adoptions in the future, it would have been important to release the new ODF 1.3 version in a timely manner, to avoid that delays could affect the position of ODF in the marketplace.

Open Document Format 1.0 was published as an ISO/IEC international standard ISO/IEC 26300 – Open Document Format for Office Applications in 2006. Open Document Format 1.2 was published as ISO/IEC standard in 2015.

In early 2018, the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation addressed the need of evolving the standard by establishing the independent COSM – Community of ODF Specification Maintainers – project at Public Software CIC (a UK Community Interest Company) to hold funds and to retain editors to work at the Technical Committee.

The COSM project co-ordinates with the OASIS TC, solicits and secures funds from ODF stakeholders, solicits experienced editors and arranges for one or more to work at the direction of the TC to edit the specification.

As a major ODF stakeholder, TDF donated a seed of Euro 10,000 to get the COSM project started, plus up to Euro 20,000 to match each euro donated by other stakeholders. So far, the COSM project has been backed by Microsoft, Collabora, CIB and the UK Government.

Editors have been working on the ODF 1.3 specifications, which have been regularly reviewed during the weekly meetings of the Technical Committee, and are expected in the third quarter of 2019. A number of features have been also been assigned to ODF 1.4. The COSM Project is now soliciting funds for future work.

Significant contributions to the specifications have been made by Regina Henschel (volunteer from The Document Foundation) and Michael Stahl from CIB.

ODF Advocacy at OASIS

Following the initiation of the COSM project, team members of The Document Foundation and CIB have got in touch with OASIS management to re-launch the defunct ODF Adoption TC as ODF Advocacy. The project has been accepted and has been launched as OASIS Open Project in May 2019, with the objective of increasing the awareness of ODF and fostering adoption by governments.

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, and everyone interested in free office software. Every year, it takes place in a different country and is supported by members of the LibreOffice commercial ecosystem. In 2018, the conference was organized by the young and dynamic Albanian community at Oficina in Tirana, from Wednesday, September 26, to Friday, September 28, the eight anniversary of the LibreOffice project. Here’s a quick video recap – read on for more details…

On Monday, September 24, there were the internal meetings of TDF’s Board of Directors and Membership Committee, followed on Tuesday, September 25, by a meeting of the TDF Team in the morning and by the traditional community meeting in the afternoon. This is a unique opportunity for representatives of native language projects and community members to meet face-to-face and discuss localization and other topics.

Over 150 people from across the globe attended the conference, including LibreOffice developers, community volunteers and Google Summer of Code students. For several people, it was their first LibreOffice Conference and therefore the first time they had met other community members in-person.

Conference

The conference started officially on the morning of Wednesday, September 26, with an address by Erion Veliaj, Mayor of Tirana, followed by the “State of the Project” – a talk which outlined some project statistics since the Rome conference – and a Q&A session with TDF’s Board of Directors. The morning track ended with sponsors’ keynotes.

In total, there were around 80 presentations, covering all aspects of LibreOffice, from development to QA, from localization to design, from documentation to marketing, and to broader subjects such as building communities and making the LibreOffice project more inclusive.

The Development Track was the richest one in terms of the number of presentations, in two different rooms, and included the usual face-to-face meeting of the Engineering Steering Committee, the Google Summer of Code Panel and a Lightning Talk Session.

In the second room there were talks about ODF, reports about migrations to LibreOffice and the adoption of the Open Document Format in Israel, Hungary, Taiwan and Turkey, and presentations about the community and other specific topics.

In the third room there was a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) and workshops about inclusiveness, documentation and certification. Finally, the conference wrapped up on the 28th of September with a celebration of the eight anniversary of the LibreOffice project.

Oficina was a great conference location, thanks to the availability of a large garden where people could relax between talks, enjoy the sunny weather, discuss with other community members about LibreOffice and take a large number of pictures.

Additional Events

In the evening of Wednesday, September 26, all conference participants met for the social dinner to better know each other and discuss – mostly informally – about their activity in the community. The event was also an opportunity to sample some local beer.

During the evening of Thursday, September 27, most conference participants met at Destil for the HackNight, to work and discuss while having some food. This was a good opportunity for people to get to know core developers, and get their opinion about the future development of LibreOffice.

The full program the 2018 LibreOffice Conference in Tirana is still available online. The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice community are now looking forward to the upcoming 2019 event, which is due to take place in Almeria, Spain.

May was an especially busy month in the project, with new releases of LibreOffice, events, workshops, interviews and more. Check it out…

• We started with a new Month of LibreOffice. These are twice-yearly campaigns where we encourage people to join our community and help to improve the software. Everyone who contributes can claim a cool sticker pack at the end – and this year, we have some exclusive glass mugs for a randomly selected bunch of winners too! Learn all about it here.

• We’re all looking forward to the upcoming LibreOffice Conference in September, in Spain – but we’re also looking further ahead, to 2020! If you’d like to organise our conference that year, bringing together LibreOffice developers, supporters and users, see our call for locations. Applications are open until the end of June.

• You’ve probably heard of the Google Summer of Code, right? Well now there’s the Google Season of Docs – and LibreOffice is taking part! The goal is to give technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

• In May, we had two new releases of LibreOffice, thanks to our volunteers and ecosystem of certified developers. LibreOffice 6.1.6 was released early in the month, while LibreOffice 6.2.4 arrived on 22nd. Both versions include bugfixes.

• Another event that’s being planned is the First LibreOffice Latin America Conference in Asunción, Paraguay. This will take place on July 19 – 20, and the call for papers is now open. Come and join our community there!

• Meanwhile, our C++ workshops are still going strong – they’re a great opportunity to explore features of the programming language, with the help of experienced LibreOffice developers. The first one this month focused on binary trees, while the second covered binary search trees.

• LibreOffice 6.3 is on the way! Our community is adding and polishing new features – and you can help to make it rock-solid reliable by joining a Bug Hunting Session. Alpha 1 is already available – but more testing versions will be released, before the final public announcement in early August.

• Members of the German LibreOffice community met at Linuxhotel in Essen for a weekend of discussions, ideas, hacking – and great food! They created a list of tasks to focus on in the coming weeks and months, assigned to various members of the community.

• On May 13, we talked to Vera Blagoveschenskaya from the Russian community, about her contributions to the project in Quality Assurance. Later in the month, we also had a chat with Buzea Bogdan who is also helping with QA – along with useful videos showing tips and tricks in the software. A big thanks to both of them for their contributions!

• In another interview, TDF team member Sophie Gautier talked about her new role as Foundation Coordinator. She will continue to organise conferences and calls within the community, but also work on other projects such as the Open Badges system (more on that soon…)

• We’re putting sections of our Annual Report 2018 on the blog! First up is TDF in 2018, followed by new releases of LibreOffice and LibreOffice Online. Stay tuned for more!

• OW2con 2019 is the annual open source event bringing together the OW2 community, technology experts, software architects, IT project managers and decision-makers from around the world. During OW2con 2019 The Document Foundation and LibreOffice Online will be presented during two different talks: “Adding LibreOffice To Your Online Solution”, and “Introducing The Document Foundation”. The event takes place at the Orange Gardens Innovation Center, Paris-Châtillon, on June 12-13.

• In other Paris news, LibreOffice Paris HackFest 2019 will take place on the weekend of July 5-6, at le 137, which is at 137 Boulevard Magenta, Paris 10e, France. The event is sponsored by INNO3, hosting the hackfest in their building, and The Document Foundation, providing reimbursement for travel and accommodation. If you’re in the Paris region, come along and say hello!

• Finally this month, TDF welcomed Adfinis SyGroup to the project’s Advisory Board. Adfinis SyGroup is using LibreOffice for office productivity, in addition to providing professional consultancy to customers with SLA contracts to support migrations from proprietary software to LibreOffice. More recently, Adfinis SyGroup has helped Collabora to start porting LibreOffice to Apple iOS to allow drafting and editing ODF standard documents on Apple iPads.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

LibreOffice Online is a cloud-based version of the suite that end users can access via a web browser. It uses the same underlying engine as the desktop app, so that documents look identical across the versions. But where did it come from, what happened in 2018, and how can you deploy it on your infrastructure? Read on to find out…

Some History

Development of LibreOffice Online started back in 2011, with the availability of a proof of concept of the client front-end, based on HTML5 technology, produced by SUSE. In 2015, this proof of concept was re-written into an initial Online Development Edition by Collabora, allowing advanced users to check out LibreOffice in the cloud for the very first time.

In 2016, the first source code release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite which provides basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using LibreOffice desktop’s “core engine”, was added to the master branch for the announcement of LibreOffice 5.3.

This last development brought collaborative editing to LibreOffice Online, a feature which transforms the application into a state of the art cloud office suite – the first to natively support the ISO/IEC standard Open Document Format (ODF) with collaborative editing features.

The rendering fidelity of LibreOffice Online is equivalent to that of the desktop software, and interoperability matches that of LibreOffice thanks to the support of both standard and proprietary document formats. LibreOffice Online has been developed mainly by Collabora, a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community.

LibreOffice Online in 2018

The main feature in online office suites is collaborative editing, and LibreOffice Online is no exception. The server module, which is key for this feature, is improved with every new major release of LibreOffice, with a focus on performance and security.

The graphical user interface was enhanced with the release of LibreOffice 6.1 by exposing various dialogs in LibreOffice core to the web browser. These dialogs were:

• Writer: Find & Replace, Edit Style, Hyperlink, Special Character, Index Entry, Character, Paragraph, Bullets & Numbering, Table Properties, Spelling & Grammar, Word Count, Change Tracking Management, Insert Header & Footer, and Column Formatting
• Calc: Ability to Add Autofilter, Ability to Filter Items via Autofilter Popup, Format Cell, Sorting Functionality, Support for Hidden Tabs, Support for Chart Data Series Editing, and Data Validation
• Impress: Position & Size, Line and Area

The most significant improvements and new features announced at the time of LibreOffice 6.2 were the following:

• Performance: improvements of scroll wheel, zooming, disk space, session and cache management, reduction of latency and unnecessary animation, and avoidance of repeated re-layout of comments & red-lines
• Mobile: simplification of user interface, improvement of on-screen keyboard and cursor handling, addition of context toolbar and cleaning of other toolbars, and improvements to comment rendering
• Integration: insertion of remote graphic from integration, addition of configurable time-limit for document conversion, installation of sample webserver config snippets, and addition of hosting/capabilities endpoint to list online features
• Document signing: integration of Vereign compatible authentication and document signature, new LibreOfficeKit signing and certificate APIs, configuration to enable/disable the signature, and addition of a signing infobar
• Other features: opening PDF files in a new tab instead of downloading them, improving configuration options for track changes, addition of a new shape insertion toolbar and of missing configuration defaults, and cleaner and more attractive 404 error reporting

LibreOffice Online Positioning

LibreOffice Online is server software which – to be fully functional – must be integrated with a service that provides file storage and authentication. As such, it can be considered an enabling technology for the public cloud of ISPs, or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations, when it is integrated – for example – with enterprise file sync and sharing software, or a groupware solution.

The Document Foundation does not plan to develop or deploy a public cloud solution similar to existing products from Google and Microsoft, because this would not be in line with the original mission of the project. The task is therefore open to ISPs and providers of open source cloud solutions, with many options already available on the market.

Given the mission-critical nature of LibreOffice Online, The Document Foundation will not be maintaining binaries for enterprises, because this would create expectations which could not be fulfilled by volunteer-based support. However, builds of the latest code, suitable for home users and those who wish to contribute to development – which is encouraged – are available as Docker images.

Berlin, May 23, 2019 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announced today that Adfinis SyGroup – a Swiss FOSS company headquarted in Bern, with offices in Basel, Zurich and Crissier (Vaud) – has joined the project’s Advisory Board.

Adfinis SyGroup is using LibreOffice for office productivity, in addition to providing professional consultancy to customers with SLA contracts to support migrations from proprietary software to LibreOffice. The company has helped to organize the LibreOffice Conference in 2014, when the event was hosted by the Bern University, is contributing patches to the source code, and is also hosting various TDF servers and buildbots on their infrastructure.

More recently, Adfinis SyGroup has helped Collabora to start porting LibreOffice to Apple iOS to allow drafting and editing ODF standard documents on Apple iPads. The underlying base of the software is LibreOfficeKit, which uses the LibreOffice code base to do tiled rendering. On top of that, a HTML/JS solution builds the UI for platforms using VCL under the hood.

“Adfinis SyGroup has been a friend of The Document Foundation since forever, and has recently increased its involvement in the LibreOffice project with the port to Apple iOS. We share the same vision about FOSS as a key element for the future of technology and innovation, and open standards as the only available road to true interoperability”, says Marina Latini, TDF Chairwoman.

“Our support for LibreOffice is part of our strategy to not only use FOSS software, but actively enable its improvement, strengthening the ecosystem and through that making the solution usable for more people. We are working closely with our partner Collabora as they invest in the iOS port, as well as helping branded LibreOffice products to gain more market share in the enterprise environment. By convincing more corporate and government organizations to choose an enterprise subscription for a branded LibreOffice we help to fund resources to further improve the product and project. We’re looking forward to contribute our many years of experience as part of the FOSS community, as well as our strong network to enterprise customers, to the TDF Advisory Board in order to contribute to one of the most important FOSS projects”, says Nicolas Christener, Adfinis SyGroup CEO and CTO.
TDF Advisory Board’s (AB) primary function is to represent supporters of the project, and to provide the Board of Directors (BoD) with advice, guidance and proposals. In addition, the AB is at the kernel of the LibreOffice ecosystem, and as such is key to the further development of the project.

The ODF Advocacy Open Project we have pre-announced at FOSDEM is now a reality. Yesterday, OASIS has released the following press release, which is just the first step of a new sustained activity focused on supporting the adoption of ODF – the only true standard document format available on the market – by governments, public administrations and enterprises worldwide, to increase interoperability (and thus knowledge sharing), reduce hidden costs associated to document management, and get rid of vendor lock-in.

OASIS Introduces Open Projects Program to Bridge Open Source and Standards Development

AirBus, CIB, Fujitsu, IBM, Red Hat, Siemens, Software AG, The Document Foundation, and others sponsor Open Projects

Boston, May 8, 2019 – OASIS, a global nonprofit consortium, today announced the launch of Open Projects, the first-of-its-kind program that creates a more transparent and collaborative future for open source and standards development. Open Projects gives communities the power to develop what they choose–APIs, code, specifications, reference implementations, guidelines– in one place, under open source licenses, with a path to recognition in global policy and procurement.

The lines between open source and open standards have been blurring for some time, and communities in both arenas have been calling for more flexibility and options for collaboration. Open Projects is a new approach that addresses the need for change in everything from handling IP to governance and decision-making, from funding to establishing trust and assuring quality.

“With Open Projects, we’re building a movement to transform the open source and standards world,” said Gershon Janssen, Chairman, OASIS Board of Directors. “We want to dissolve the barriers that separate communities. We want to empower groups with more control and streamlined governance. We want to support projects by giving them all the process they need–and not a bit more–so they can accomplish great things fast.”

Open Projects builds on the OASIS experience and reputation for producing quality work that’s been trusted and supported by governments and industries worldwide for more than 25 years.

“For many, open source has become a means of establishing de facto software standards. However, de facto standards are not recognized by many governments and institutions,” said Chris Ferris, IBM Fellow and CTO Open Tech for IBM. “OASIS Open Projects provides an important new opportunity to leverage the rapid innovation of open source in the process of developing open standards. The potential to achieve ISO, IEC, or ITU standards approval is a huge value for many important open source initiatives.” Ferris, who also holds a leadership position on the Hyperledger Fabric project, played an instrumental role in defining the OASIS Open Projects program and now serves on its Advisory Council.

The Open Projects program is being advanced by some of the most accomplished, regarded minds in open source today.

As part of the program announcement, OASIS is launching the first two Open Projects – Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and OpenDocument Format (ODF) Advocacy.

The OSLC Open Project advances a suite of standard REST APIs to connect data and achieve the digital thread across domains, applications, and organizations. It is sponsored by AirBus, Austrian Institute of Technology, Bank of America, Boeing, Dassault, Fujitsu, IBM, Koneksys, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Red Hat, Siemens, Software AG, and Tasktop.

“OSLC helps create standard REST APIs that solve industry integration challenges,” said Andrew Berezovskyi of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. “Open Projects enables the OSLC community to produce deliverables that meet requirements from various stakeholders without being hindered by the weight of foundation bureaucracy or the baggage that comes with financial, legal, technical, and marketing administration.”

The ODF Advocacy Open Project promotes the world’s leading document standard. After being approved as an OASIS Standard, ODF was recognized by ISO/IEC and endorsed by governments around the world as a way to ensure permanent access to data and eliminate the risk of vendor lock-in. The ODF Advocacy Open Project is sponsored by CIB and The Document Foundation.

“ODF guarantees perennial access to data that can be transferred in a transparent way between different apps, computers and operating systems, getting rid of hidden interoperability costs, vendor lock-in issues and license fees,” said Italo Vignoli, Co-Founder, The Document Foundation.

Additional Open Projects for blockchain and other areas will be announced in the coming months. Further details about OASIS Open Projects are available here or email info@oasis-open-projects.org.

The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s First LibreOffice Latin America Conference in Asunción, Paraguay. The event is scheduled for mid July, from Friday 19 to Saturday 20. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by May 31st, 2019, 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:

a) Cases of migration to LibreOffice

b) Standard OpenDocument Format (ODF)

c) Community & Ecosystem

d) Resources & functionalities of LibreOffice

e) Quality Assurance

f) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects

g) Advocating LibreOffice

Presentations, case studies, workshops, 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). To submit your proposal, visit https://latam.conference.libreoffice.org/

The talks will be presented in the auditorium of the Polytechnic Faculty of the National University of Asuncion (FPUNA). The authors of the approved talks will be notified by e-mail as of June 10 and the publication of the preliminary programming grid will be carried out on June 30. The event is free and registration is open.

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.

If you want to give multiple talks please send a separate response for each.

I have gone through several stages of this and so far nothing has stuck as ideal, but I think I am inching towards it.

To start off, I have to confess that while I love the internet and the web, I loathe having everything in the browser. The browser becoming the OS is what seems to be happening, and I hate that thought. I like to keep things locally, having backups, and control over my documents and data. Although I changed my e-mail provider(s) several times, I still have all my e-mail locally stored from 2003 until today.

I also do not like reading longer texts on an LCD, so I usually put longer texts into either Wallabag or Mozilla’s Pocket to read them later on my eInk reader (Kobo Aura). BTW, Wallabag and Pocket both have their pros and cons themselves. Pocket is more popular and better integrated into a lot of things (e.g. Firefox, Kobo, etc.), while Wallabag is fully FOSS (even the server) and offers some extra features that are in Pocket either subject to subscription or completely missing.

Still, an enormous amount of information is (and should be!) on the web, so each of us needs to somehow keep track and make sense of it :)

So, with that intro out of the way, here is how I tackle(d) this mess.

Historic overview of methods I used so far¶

Hierarchy of folders¶

As many of us, I guess, I started with first putting bookmarks in the bookmark bar, but soon had to start organising them into folders … and subfolders … and subsubfolders …and subsubsubfolders … until the screen did not fit the whole tree of them any more when expanded.

Pro:

• can be neat and tidy
• easy to sync between devices through e.g. Firefox Sync

Con:

• can become a huge mess, once it grows to a behemoth
• takes several clicks to put a bookmark into the appropriate (sub)folder

Tags + search bar¶

Then I decided to keep it flat and use the Firefox search bar to find what I am looking for.

To achieve that, when I bookmarked something, I renamed it to something useful and added tags (e.g.: shop, tea; or python, sql, howto).

This worked kinda OK, but a big downside is that there is a huge amount of clutter which is not easy to navigate and edit once you want to organise all the already existing bookmarks. The bookmark panel is somewhat helpful, but not a lot.

Pro:

• easy to search
• easy to find a relevant bookmark when you are about to search for something through the combined URL/search bar
• easy to sync between devices through e.g. Firefox Sync

Con:

• your search query must match the name, tag(s), or URL of bookmark
• hard to find or navigate other than searching (for name tag, URL)

OneTab¶

Several years after that, I learnt about OneTab from an onboarding website of a company I applied to (but did not get the job). The main promise of it is to loads of open tabs into (simple) organised lists on a single page. And all that with a single click (well, two really).

This worked wonders for (still does) for decluttering my tab list. Especially when grouped with Tree Style Tabs, which I very warmly recommend trying out. Even if it looks odd and unrully at first, it is very easy to get used to and helps organise tabs immensely. But back to OneTab…

The good side of OneTab is that it really helps keep your tab bar clean and therefore reduces your computer’s resource usage. It is also super for keeping track of tabs that you may (or maybe not) need to open again later, as you can (re)open a whole group of “tabs” with a single click.

As a practical example, let us say I am travelling to Barcelona in two months. So I book flights and the hotel, and in the process also check out some touristy and other helpful info. Because I will not be needing the touristy and travel stuff for quite some time before the trip, I do not need all the tabs open. But as it is a one-off trip, it is also silly to bookmark it all. So I send them all to OneTab and name the group e.g. “Barcelona trip 2019”. If I stumble upon any new stuff that is relevant, I simply send it to the same Named Group in OneTab. Once I need that info, I either open individual “tabs” or restore the whole group with one click and have it ready. An additional cool thing is that by default if you open a group or a single link “tab” from OneTab, it will remove it from the list. You can decide to keep the links in the list as well.

In practices, I still used tagged bookmarks for links that I wanted to store long-term, while depending on OneTab for short- to mid-term storage.

Pro:

• great for decluttering your tabs
• helps keep your browser’s resource usage low
• great for creating (temporary) lists of tabs that you do not need now, but will in the future
• can easily send a group of “tabs” with others via e-mail

Con:

• no tags, categories or other means of adding meta data – you can only name groups, and cannot even rename links
• no searching other than through the “webpage” list of “tabs”
• as the list of “tabs”/bookmarks grows, the harder it is to keep an overview
• cannot sync between devices
• (proprietary plug-in)

Worldbrain’s Memex¶

About two months ago, I stumbled upon Worldbrain’s Memex through a FOSDEM talk. It promises to fix bookmarking, searching, note-taking and web history for you … which is quite an impressive lot.

So far, I have to say, I am quite impressed. It is super easy to find stuff you visited, even if you forgot to bookmark it, as it indexes all the websites you visit (unless you put tell Memex to ignore that page or domain).

For more order, you can assign tags to websites and/or store them into collections (i.e. groups or folders). What is more, you can do that even later, if you forgot about it the first time. If you want to especially emphasise a specific website, you can also star it.

An excellent feature missing in other bookmarking methods I have seen so far is that it lets you annotate websites – through highlights and comments and tags attached to those highlights. So, not only can you store comments and tags on the websites, but also on annotations within those websites.

One concern I have is that they might have taken more than what they can chew, but since I started using it, I have seen so much progress that I am (cautiously) optimistic about it.

Pro:

• supports both tags and collections (i.e. groups)
• enables annotations/highlights and comments (as well as tags to both) to websites
• indexes websites, so when you search for something it goes through both the website’s text, as well as your notes to that website and, of course, tags
• starring websites you would like to find more easily
• you can also set specific websites or domain names to be ignored
• it offers quite an advanced search, including limiting by data ranges, stars, or domains
• when you search for something (e.g. using DuckDuckGo or Google) it shows suggested websites that you already visited before
• sharing of annotations and comments with others (as long as they also have Memex installed)
• for annotations it uses the W3C Open Annotation spec
• stores everything locally (with the exception of sharing annotations via a link, of course)

Con:

• it consumes more disk space due to running its own index
• needs an external app for backing up data
• so far no syncing of bookmarks between devices (but it is in the making)
• so far it does not sync annotations between different devices (but both mobile apps for iOS/Android, and Pocket integration are in the making)

Status quo and looking at the future¶

I currently have still a few dozen bookmarks that I need to tag in Memex and delete from my Firefox bookmarks. And a further several dozen in OneTab.

The most viewed websites, I have in the “Top Sites” in Firefox.

Most of the “tabs” in OneTab, I have already migrated to Memex and I am looking very much forward to trying to use it instead of OneTab. So far it seems a bit more work, as I need to 1) open all tabs into a tab tree (same as in OneTab), 2) open that tab tree in a separate window (extra step), and then 3) use the “Tag all tabs in window” or “Add all tabs in window” option from the extension button (similar as in OneTab), and finally 4) close the tabs by closing the window (extra step). What I usually do is to change a Tab Group from OneTab to a Collection in Memex and then take some extra time to add tags or notes, if appropriate.

So, I am quite confident Memex will be able to replace OneTab for me and most likely also (most) normal bookmarks. I may keep some bookmarks of things that I want to always keep track of, like my online bank’s URL, but I am not sure yet.

The annotations are a god-send as well, which will be very hard to get rid of, as I already got used to them.

Now, if I could only send stuff to my eInk reader (or phone), annotate it there and have those annotations auto-magically show up in the browser and therefore stored locally on my laptop … :D

Oh, oh, and if I could search through Memex from my KDE Plasma desktop and add/view annotations from other documents (e.g. ePub, ODF, PDF) and other applicatios (e.g. Okular, Calibre, LibreOffice). One may dream …

hook out → sipping Vin Santo and planning more order in bookmarks

P.S. This blog post was initially a comment to the topic “How do you organize your bookmarks?” in the ~tech group on Tildes where further discussion is happening as well.

This is the first ever LibreOffice conference covering Latin America, a rapidly-growing area for free and open source software.

Berlin, April 2nd, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces the LibreOffice Latin America Conference 2019, held at the Facultad Politécnica de Universidad Nactional de Assunción (FPUNA) in Asunción, Paraguay on July 19th (Friday) and 20th (Sat).

LibreOffice Latin America Conference will be the first event gathering LibreOffice users, advocates and contributors (not only development, but also localization, PR/marketing, documentation, quality assurance, … etc.) from different countries in Latin America, to exchange and share experiences and knowledge.

An exclusive translation sprint to Guarani will be held in parallel during the event with supervision of LibreOffice volunteer developers.

During the conference, we will discuss LibreOffice related business such as supporting and training, migrating to LibreOffice and the ODF true standard format, developing, and any other community activity in Latin America. In addition, we will have guests from the core team at The Document Foundation, which is a charitable foundation and the home of LibreOffice.

“The event will be an important opportunity for the consolidation of LibreOffice and free open source software in the region, bringing experiences from other countries for discussions and software development in Latin America” commented Alcides Javier Torres Gutt, professor at FPUNA. “FPUNA is proud to host the event for the Paraguayan FOSS communities, as well as advancing in the creation of a real LibreOffice with Guarani user interface”.

“The Document Foundation is a global organization, and as such wants to tighten the relationship with local communities in areas like Latin America, where there are huge growth opportunities for free open source software. A conference is the best way of putting together LibreOffice advocates, and sharing experiences and best practices at continental level” said Italo Vignoli, Marketing and Communication specialist at the Document Foundation.

Contact the conference organizers at mail address latinoamerica@global.libreoffice.org.

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Licensing

Berlin, February 28, 2019 – Call for Papers for LibreOffice Asia Conference 2019, held at the Nihonbashi Tokyo Tower (at Cyboze, Inc., Tokyo Office) on May 25th (Sat) and 26th (Sun), is now open.

LibreOffice Asia Conference will be the first event gathering LibreOffice users, advocates and contributors (not only development, but also localization, PR/marketing, documentation, quality assurance, ‌ etc.) from different countries in Asia, to exchange and share experiences and knowledge.

During the conference, we will discuss LibreOffice related business such as supporting and training, migrating to LibreOffice and the ODF true standard format, developing, and any other community activity in Asia. In addition, we will have guests from the core team at The Document Foundation, which is a charitable foundation and the home of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Kaigi, the traditional local event for Japanese speakers, will be held in parallel with the conference. So, there will be an English track and a Japanese track.

Any topic related to LibreOffice and ODF, such as LibreOffice user cases, contribution experiences in different areas, technical analisys of LibreOffice code development, success stories of migrations from proprietary software, or tips and tricks about LibreOffice usage, and so on, are all welcome. All talks will be 25 minutes long, including Q&A.

We are planning to reimburse expenses to accepted speakers, based on TDF reimbursement rules, including:

• Flight or bullet train tickets (please note that tickets for local trains will NOT be reimbursed)
• Accommodations for two nights in a hotel (please note that luxury hotels will NOT be reimbursed)

Do not hesitate to send your proposals, even if you live far from Tokyo or in another country in Asia.

To submit your talk proposal, please send an e-mail to libo-asia-contact@libreoffice.jp with:

Subject: [CFP] Title of your Talk

Your Name:
Your e-mail address:
Your profile:
Title of the Talk:
Abstract: (around 300 words)
Estimate of expenses to be reimbursed (if you will be asking for reimbursement)

In order to allow everyone to plan in advance their travels and accommodations, the deadline for the call for papers is on March 10th (Sun) 23:59:59 JST (UTC+9).

We will inform all approved speakers by March 22nd (Fri) JST.

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LibreOffice developers and other community members were present at FOSDEM 2019, the biggest European meetup of free and open source software developers. Check out the talks that they gave! Click a link to find out more and watch the videos‌

• Relaunching the ODF Adoption TC at OASIS (Italo Vignoli)
• Server side solution for generating ODF reports (Franklin Weng)
• Resurrecting Mozilla Themes for LibreOffice (Muhammet Kara)
• Quo vadis, LibreOffice extensions? (Heiko Tietze)
• Improving LibreOffice quality together (Xisco Fauli)
• Collabora Office on iOS (Tor Lillqvist)
• Preventing OOXML interoperability problems in LibreOffice (Gabor Kelemen)
• New interoperability, i18n and LibreLogo improvements of LibreOffice (LĂĄszlĂł NĂŠmeth)
• MySQL connector and other databases in LibreOffice (TamĂĄs Bunth)
• How to bring LibreOffice to your web app (Michael Meeks)
• Vereign toolbar in LibreOffice Online (Andras Timar)
• Improving SmartArt import in LibreOffice Impress (Miklos Vajna)
• Do you know “layers”? (Regina Henschel)
• Clang plugins in LibreOffice – global analyses across a large codebase (Noel Grandin)
• Native GTK Dialogs – current status and future work (CaolĂĄn McNamara)
• Are we optimiert yet? (Michael Stahl)
• Lightning Talks

A big thanks to the FOSDEM organisers for their great work!

The First LibreOffice Asia Conference Will Be Held On May 25-26, 2019 In Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan

This is the first ever LibreOffice conference covering Asia, a rapidly-growing area for free and open source software. The call for papers will be launched soon.

Berlin, February 18, 2019 – After the huge success of the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in 2018, members of the Asian communities have decided to raise the bar in 2019 with the first ever LibreOffice Asia Conference in Nihonbashi – the very center of Tokyo, Japan – on May 25-26.

One of the main organizers, Naruhiko Ogasawara, a member of the Japanese LibreOffice community and The Document Foundation, can’t hide his excitement: “When we launched the LibreOffice Mini Conference Japan in 2013 as a local event, we knew little about communities in other parts of Asia. In recent years we have attended the LibreOffice Conference and other Asian events like OpenSUSE Asia, COSCUP etc. We have realized that many of our colleagues are active and that our community should learn a lot from them. We are proud to be able to hold the first Asia Conference with our colleagues to further strengthen that partnership.”

“It’s a real leap of faith,” says Franklin Weng, an Asian member in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. “Asia is a rapidly-growing area in adoptions of ODF and LibreOffice, but our ecosystem for LibreOffice and FOSS has not been good enough yet. In this conference we’re not only trying to make the FOSS ecosystem in Asia more healthy, but also to encourage Asian community members to show their potential.”

Several core members from The Document Foundation will attend this conference, including Italo Vignoli, leader of the marketing and public relations community (and co-chairman of LibreOffice Certification Committee), along with Lothar Becker, who is also co-chairman of the Certification Committee. In addition, there will be community members from Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and probably China attending.

The main focus areas of this conference include:

• Business workshop – which will be hosted by Lothar Becker and Italo Vignoli. Lothar and Italo will discuss business services: what are the fundamentals of LibreOffice business services, the current status of LibreOffice business in Europe, Asia and other geographies, and how we can support each other, etc.
• CJK Hackfest – which will be led by Mark Hung, a LibreOffice Certified Developer in Taiwan, to discuss and hack CJK issues in LibreOffice.
• Certification Interview – the second LibreOffice Certification Interview in Asia will be held during the LibreOffice Asia Conference, hosted by Italo Vignoli and Lothar Becker. So far total four or five candidates will be interviewed for LibreOffice Certified Migration Professionals and LibreOffice Certified Trainers.
• Asia Local Certification for LibreOffice – which will be hosted by Franklin Weng and Eric Sun, two TDF members from Taiwan, to introduce the concept of having LibreOffice skills and trainer certifications in Asia.

The call for proposals will be launched soon in February. Besides the topics above, other LibreOffice and ODF-related topics are also welcome.

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