 you're seeing a bug in impress when you have the when you have the shadow effect then and you have an entrance animation effect so shadow not an animation effect chat like fixed shadow effect on on a transparent text box and you have an entrance then the shadow appears before the before the object enters which is so remember when I said impress needs to be brought up to the level of quality of writer so this is the kind of things I was talking about shall I start then so thank you everyone who chose chose this talk over the the development talk which is held in parallel I'm a lozenberg and I'm going to be talking and I'm well I'll talk a bit about my experience in a second but our title for this session is five things that we could do to help LibreOffice language communities flourish so if anybody well if you don't recognize that logo then it doesn't matter so I'll start with some cavites so I said things that that we can do so they're mostly things that that you guys and the foundation and more central people than myself might want to do and and these are suggestions I might but might be totally totally wrong about what's but what are the what the best things to do are but this is so this is my perspective off the top of my head we didn't even have a discussion about this in our users groups so so don't treat this as authoritative in any way and what I'm suggesting is relevant to language communities that are smaller and and or less active it's not very relevant to to the larger ones and this this can very well be a conversational session so you can interrupt me at any time that we might have a problem with the the microphone okay so yeah so so people will somebody Gabriela or whoever will bring the microphone to you and and the slides you can also read them afterwards because the suggestions are relevant also to people were not in this room right now so treat them as like something to have a look at when you're thinking about work with the language communities and finally I'm not saying that none of what I'm suggesting is happening today but what is done today seems to be lacking or insufficient in my not so humble opinion so I I said my own experience so my native language is Hebrew and I also speak some Arabic while I also speak other languages like English but I'm not involved in you know the English or Romanian language communities so this is what I'm focusing on so I'm in the Hebrew community and the Arabic or Arabic and Farsi community but my involvement at least so far has only been well other than this conference has only been online I've not organized or participated in events before I've not done any advocacy or anything like that so my activity is in the and I'm almost so active on the right to left languages channel which isn't a language community it's it's for all languages that that are written from for right to left and for issues that are common to all of them and what I do meant mostly is complain or in other words file bugs but I also do a lot of triaging which is not like so that's like the sublimated complaint activities so that's me and plus I said five things and they're but they're actually gonna be five categories so it's more like 50 things in five categories the first category is improving the exposure of the language community so what do I mean by that the we need to increase the exposure of the communities the venues of the community or mechanisms for getting in touch with people in that active users in that community may at least for the from the communities I'm from it's it's the telegram channels or IRC channels for other communities they might be using email more they might even have meetings or some other online platform and this needs to be better exposed to users of LibreOffice who use that language so where can can that happen more it could happen on the on the path on the LibreOffice website that gets you to the download so you start from whatever landing page or the main page and you click download and then you you make other clicks to choose what download you want and and then there's also even the the pages that you get after you download or and or install and and like links to relevant venues of your language community which means that can be depend on the localization that you chose but can also but can also depend on which localized version of the site you're using or maybe even information about the country or from that that the site can get from your IP and all of those are relevant to say to say you might be interested in this community or that community maybe you want to go there it could happen in localized installers it could happen in non localized installers on systems where the locale is is relevant to a certain language community and and I'm making this distinction because in some especially in in language communities that are smaller a lot of people maybe even a majority prefer using a localized version or the English version for some language that is not their native one but is like the popular second language so maybe the historical colonial occupier it could be the the French or the Spanish or the Portuguese or the English and very often people will down like in like in India there's a lot of use of of the English language some people even prefer it for formal correspondence for example that that's not a small community but just an example more places for exposure so the user guides the localized user guides or even the English one don't really emphasize that you might be interested in joining the language community of languages in which you're using LibreOffice like the preface section is where this seems to fit right now you don't really there is not exact there's something there it's not quite there let's not get into the details because we only have half an hour there are links here though so you can see examples of what I mean the the targets of links from the help menu of the applications themselves especially the pages you get to when you click get involved or feedback they don't lead you to venues of your relevant language communities yes many represent a smaller community of Russian users as far as I know they get involved it is a LibreOffice help menu I understand that you're talking about application not the website right not exactly what I mean is that when you click get involved or feedback that takes you to a page on on the LibreOffice website so when you click on that page it gets you to the when you get to that link in your program it gets to the page that might be local for this community for instance for Russian UI it would bring you to site dedicated to Russian community so it is a matter of the community possibly active participant of that community to creating that page and informing TDF about which page should be landing point so it is a good idea and it is it already has infrastructure for that so that's great and thanks Mike for that correction but but the fact that I suggested it means that at least for some language communities and especially for ones which are just which are smaller or weaker it's more likely for this not to be the case so we do want so we want to use the mechanism that we already have and of course those that we don't have to to do exactly that what Mike said is already the case for the Russian language something else to consider maybe a separate item on the the help menu that I'm not exactly sure I don't have a very concrete suggestion but something which which differentiates between getting involved or getting help or given feet giving feedback to some and with distinguishing that from something that relates to your your specific language like maybe with a different language paid landing page I'm not sure it's just a night something to think about another another place is ask dot LibreOffice.org a lot of the sections there have like don't have a section header that's that's part of the the website itself and sometimes there's a pinned introductory post but those are often just the template text for an introductory post and certainly and very often or more often than not don't suggest that you can also go to this place or that place for further discussion or consultation with people in your language community and finally there's the ambassadors or champions program or idea that was also mentioned well before the the formal starting of this conference which could possibly see some focus on low language communities that are struggling or have the most challenges because they're they're more unique and need more feature support. So I won't actually go through the the entire list there I have a full and other page of ideas of where there could be further exposure and it could even be on volunteering platforms I will mention that there are language specific or country specific platforms when where people are offered opportunities for doing volunteer work maybe we could post on those platforms and suggest that we might want help probably in not in the the development aspect of LibreOffice but certainly with things like like you know support translations and other you know semi-technical or non-technical activities and I'll finally say about about this this point is that we might have the other problem so if if all of my suggestions were taken then you would just get spam so you don't want to promote language communities everywhere and we have to ask ourselves where it would be more useful and also there's a question of readiness of the language community if it's already struggling and you get like two three five new people are you able as a community to to engage with them to answer their questions to maybe direct them into doing something that's useful so the and there's and finally there's the the need to balance between attracting volunteers and people who are interested in the project as a whole and people who would be interested in language community specific work so that was the first section any questions okay on to number two which is communications mentioned is very important again in a pre conference session that we had I would like the the foundation on the project to relay to each language community especially the struggling ones information about upcoming events not just the conference obviously but internal or public discussions that are relevant to that community conferences and meet-ups in in relevant countries not just our annual conference and even the this conference itself it didn't get that much of a publicity or a pitch on in my two language communities just so you know information about work that's scheduled to be done that relates to the language community's interest but it's going to be done by people who are not in that community or not even with work itself also when there is planning and the language community might want to contribute input so information about we're going to plan this year's I don't know tenders maybe you want to and maybe you want to sit in on that and of course the formal relevant decisions that are made or documents that have been produced and a lot of that does not happen so the language the the the telegram channels of the and their single channels were not split into like announce and discuss but a lot of this information is not going through yes so related some of the points that you mentioned before as far as I know Mike Schunders who is not here he has a calendar somewhere in the website and he keeps it updated with local events yeah anything related to LibreOffice so I think that's for some of the points that could be used as reference I mean there's already some information in one place for some of the points you you mentioned I don't know the calendar though where it's just a matter of pointing to that yeah yes we have a wiki event page sometimes not maintain its problem but you can use the wiki page and checking so these are suggestions that you made they are relevant certain they're certainly relevant but these are pull rather than push mechanisms and I'm suggesting there be more pushing rather than just the ability to pull in terms of communications so I think that the communications between the project and the language community again especially weaker and and struggling communities happen more routinely and more frequently that it have different end points and that means that Sophie is great and and that I'm full of appreciation for her work but there's but she can she can't and she shouldn't do all or almost all of the of this kind of communication work with language communities so I want to see developers and designers and people who are QA focus maybe even Cisco but I'm not done a single you out but people of different capacities communicate directly with language groups when it's relevant sometimes maybe bodies of the foundation like the engineering steering committee or other committees and there should oh hopefully be some variation on the endpoints from the language community side so it shouldn't just be one or two people who are the only ones who ever get notified of things so it's important to keep the variety also the bidirectionality to encourage the community to communicate things back and yeah and both unofficial and official communications okay I also suggest that not just things that I mentioned things that should be communicated to I also think that more solicitations that should happen so solicitation of delegates to participate in events and and processes of making decisions solicitation of feedback on things that have happened and affect the community both technical or user experience but also ongoing efforts or or decisions that have been made solicitation of requests do you need X do you want to X if and that could even happen on the individual level so individual members of the language community might be the people who say we need I'm I think we need X or need Y and also reporting as the community to say what it's done to write up what it's done and not just one like the few lines in the annual report that we do have but I think that's not enough okay and and something that's more tricky and challenging because there are a lot of language communities so I'm not sure this is a recommendation to adopt is trying to build personal rapport with with some members at least of the language community and it's important if we could we at least need to strive to make members or active users in the language community feel that their contributions are appreciated and their effort is appreciated and their grievances the complaints that they make are at least are certainly heard and addressed to the extent that it's relevant to be addressed and it's not clear that this always happens I mean obviously we can't fit and you we you can't fix all the bugs and everything that people want to be fixed but the question of acknowledgement on the emotional level is something that should be thought about and that they're not alone if it's a really small group the sense of we're just we're like ignored we're not important nobody cares about our existence or what we do because we're not vocal enough or don't participate enough can be it can can create the sort of vicious cycle of inactivity so showing interest even on the personal level and some of what what an individual contributor might be doing and again this this is the most demanding in terms of in terms of effort but it would it would help and for the for people who do contribute more trying to watch out for people not to burn out because in the struggling community sometimes sorry for ignoring you cool sometimes a smaller number of people or even a single person ends up with everything on their shoulders and then if he gets prompted for even more interaction more requests then there's that danger that instead of doing more they'll end up you know just quitting and giving up so that's something to watch out for even within language communities this isn't just something that I want people in the project or the foundation to watch out for third subject yeah yes I realize that yes yes I'll for sure so knowledge and skill sharing I'll just give the example and you can do the generalization so the the user group in Germany or rather the German language users group in the past has operated a booth in in a computer trade show in sebbit or chebbit and and theoretically they could teach other language communities how to do that or they could teach in the sense of of having like a training session or they could write a description or or a guide on how to do that and suppose they wrote such a guide then the the foundation would then should have the responsibility of making sure this is disseminated to other relevant language communities and they could propose like a list of items for example we you need like metal bars you need pages you need scotch tape you need x and you need y then the foundation could create like a kit of these items and regardless of whether it buys them for a language community or just suggests where they could be procured or even just the this list of items for a language community to have if it wants to do the same thing so generalizing from this this is this is relevant to other kinds of activities and other kinds of documents and we should also think about what a language community can do for other communities if it's more established and what the the foundation or people in the project developers or other capacities could do to facilitate the the interaction of communities so skip this slide with your permission a fourth point or fourth category of things I would like to see happen that would help a language struggling language communities is making aspects of the contribution easier and more accessible the term friction lists was mentioned in in the preliminary discussion we had the other day so we need to do more to help potential contributors or users who have shun somehow showed up on on ask or IRC or telegram to be able to understand what they can contribute because this is not clear enough to figure out how they can make that contribution when they decided they're interested in contributing in some way and this is especially true with respect to translation work bug reporting work and and diving if they want to potentially consider going into the source code so I'm definitely not going to talk about the source code part here that could be a talk in itself but I will say a few words about translation and bug reporting in the the couple of minutes that I have so there are lots of problems with web late or the way it's installed right now navigation is very confusing there is a mix up of different languages when you look at the web late user interface it's hard to find an individual thing that you wanted to translate you can't tell the system I only want to translate this kind of things don't show me other things I'm difficult to do that you don't get an information of where in the UI a string that you're trans translating comes from exactly I don't didn't see where where how consistency in translation is promoted we would need a mechanism of telling of being able to say I want to translate this string that I'm seeing in LibreOffice right now we don't have that and translation guidelines are missing and there are the related similar issues for bug reporting the meta bug the hierarchy is not very visible and I'll skip all of this so so definitely some room for improvement in that front and a final thing in the last minute and a half I think that we can we you can better foster specific responsibilities and roles within language communities so like bodies within a community if it becomes a little larger people who are in in charge of at least coordinating efforts on translation on language community specific bugs on monitoring the activities of the the document foundation and the project outside the language community maybe report to the language community rather than have like the the stream of everything that happens have someone in charge of saying these are important things that happen that we need to care about people who are specifically asons to certain bodies so these are possible roles of course if the community is small not all of them will be filled but I think that and this is something that the weaker and smaller communities have trouble with especially when people silently drop drop out and they had an effective but not like not an official role than their aspect of the activity can just die out because nobody is there to notice that oh this needs to be done so maybe some kind of tracking or help with tracking by the foundation of who is the contact point for certain things and who's responsible for certain things and if they like go off the radar to notice that and to remind maybe other people in the language community about that being the case yeah including on IRC or the telegram channels so that's that's basically it there's also budget and staffing which we might need to to think about to carry out some of these suggestions and yesterday we had the the task prioritization that we did and a lot of people suggested more developers and nobody said including myself more language community support staff so another thing to think about thank you very much I know it was quick but have a look at the slides if you thought if you heard some things that you thought are interesting and I'm very open to discussion after the this set of sessions and thanks for listening