LibreOffice project and community recap: May 2023

Posted in Community, LibreOffice By Mike Saunders On June 1, 2023

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

• We started May with the Month of LibreOffice! This is a campaign that we run twice a year, encouraging users to join our community and help to improve the software. Everyone can learn new things – and get some merchandise as thanks! Results will be announced here on the blog very soon…

• Also early in May, we announced LibreOffice 7.5.3 Community, the third minor update to the 7.3 branch. All users are recommended to upgrade. (We also announced LibreOffice 7.4.7, the last release of the 7.4 family.)

• LibreOffice’s YouTube channel went over the 3 million views mark. Great stuff! We’d like to say a special thanks to community members who’ve contributed great work, such as the Indonesian community for the “New Features” videos (major LibreOffice releases), and Harald B. in the German community for his tutorials. (Note that many of the videos are also available on PeerTube.)

• Our QA (Quality Assurance) community helps to identify and fix bugs in LibreOffice. Every week, Ilmari Lauhakangas from The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice) live-streams bug triaging sessions, so that others can see how he works on bug reports, and ask him questions. So, what do attendees think of the sessions so far? We asked some regulars – here’s what they said…

• Throughout May, we posted sections from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2022. TDF is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice community and provides infrastructure – all thanks to generous donations from users! Here are the sections on social media, user interface design, attracting new contributors to the project and documentation.

• The LibreOffice Conference 2023 is coming up in Bucharest, Romania – September 21 – 23! And sponsorship packages are now available. Get in contact with one of the largest open source communities in the world, showcase your brand, and support FOSS!

• One of the goals of The Document Foundation and the community it represents is to improve LibreOffice to make it even more competitive with other office suites. And one of the tools to achieve this goal are tenders for the development of specific features, such as the implementation of OpenDocument Format version 1.3, the standard format used by LibreOffice and other applications. So we are looking for tender ideas and proposals to improve LibreOffice – let us know what you think.

• On May 12 and 13, the esLibre Conference took place in Zaragoza, Spain and the Spanish-speaking LibreOffice community took the opportunity to meet in person and talk about the project.

• Ever heard the term “scratching your own itch”? Wiktionary describes it as “doing something out of motivation to solve a personal problem”. In the world of free and open source software development, this happens a lot! Anyone can contribute to FOSS projects like LibreOffice, and help to improve them. And that’s exactly what Rafael Lima did, with a long-standing limitation in LibreOffice. Here’s what he had to say.

• Emiliano Vavassori, Deputy Chairperson in The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, give us an update on recent events in Italy.

• The LibreOffice Google Summer of Code projects have been selected for 2023! Find out the improvements and new features that students will be working on.

• And finally, we welcomed Khaled Hosny to the team at TDF. He’ll focusing on improving LibreOffice’s language support, making the software more accessible to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

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