 Hello all. Today we have Mike from LibreOffice. A short bio of Mike is that Mike Saunders is a free and open source software user, advocate and developer. Originally an Amiga fan, he moved to GNU slash Linux in 1998 with Red Hat 5.2. In the last 20 years, he has worked as a journalist for many Linux magazines. And is currently employed at the Document Foundation doing marketing and community outreach for the LibreOffice community. In addition, he has written his own operating system, Mike OS. Today he will talk about LibreOffice and the community behind it. So I would like to invite Mike to go ahead. Thanks, Ravi. Thank you for the invitation to this event as well. Yeah, I'm happy to be here as well. I've been talking to Ravi in the last few weeks about building up free and open source software LibreOffice community in India as well. We have LibreOffice users and developers in India, so I think we can do more there. But yes, today I want to give everybody an overview of what the LibreOffice project is, what the Document Foundation does, the small nonprofit entity behind LibreOffice. And show you what we're doing and how you can get involved, how everybody can get involved in our project as well. So Ravi already introduced me as well. I've been in free and open source software world for a while using GNU Linux since 98. Actually Red Hat 5.1. I remember now I got it from a computer magazine at the time on a CD and installed it. Okay, this is way windows. This gives me freedom back control. So very quickly I became a fan of free software and open standards as well. And I started to write articles for Linux magazines and free software magazines and websites. And then I did work on my own operating system here, MyCoS, which is very, very basic and primitive, but is also free software. A bit of fun, a bit of geeky fun. And yes, today I work for the Document Foundation, this nonprofit entity behind LibreOffice that I'll talk about in a few minutes. But first a quick overview of what LibreOffice is. So many of you may have seen LibreOffice already or heard about it or use it of course as well, but LibreOffice is an office suite. LibreOffice is a free and open source software office suite. So here is a picture, a screenshot of LibreOffice writer, the word processor component. But it includes all of the tools in an office suite as well as I'll show you. It has an interesting background, an interesting history as well. It went from closed proprietary software to become free and open source software as well. So an office suite, productivity tools as well. So LibreOffice actually means two things for us. It is this office productivity suite, office software, used by millions of people around the world. And we estimate now around 200 million users at LibreOffice. So quite a lot. But it's also, it's way more than just, it's a whole project, a whole community of people passionate about free software, open standards, and making something together, creating something that everybody can work on. Anybody can benefit from in 100 languages. I think we have LibreOffice now in 114 languages. So many languages used in India and South America, Europe, all across the world as well. So LibreOffice, yes, software, an office suite, but also a community, a project. And then behind LibreOffice is the Document Foundation, this foundation I work for based here in Germany. And our objective is the promotion and development of office software for use by anyone. It's important to note that we are not the developers of LibreOffice. We all do some bits of development. We are all geeky and program, but LibreOffice is made by this big community around the world and companies in the ecosystem as well. We don't just sit every day and program the features for LibreOffice. At the Document Foundation, we coordinate the community so that development can take place, so that people can join in, get involved, help to work on it and different features. So we sit in the middle, make sure that LibreOffice is a project and a community is strong, hopefully, and has a good future. We do some work on the software as well, but we want to make sure that development can take place. And we are the Document Foundation, not the LibreOffice Foundation, because maybe one day we will have other software in our community as well. Some of you may know Thunderbird, the email client Thunderbird. A few years ago, the Thunderbird community was looking for a new home as well, wasn't sure if they wanted to stay in Mozilla at the time. And we talked to them as well, maybe Thunderbird can become part of the Document Foundation, like LibreOffice, yeah, OfficeWeed, email client together, makes sense. In the end that didn't happen, but yeah, we are always open to doing more than just LibreOffice, although LibreOffice is plenty of work anyway, so we focus on that. Here's Calc, the spreadsheet, so another component of the suite as well for doing calculations and graphs. So what's our philosophy in our project as well. As mentioned, we care about the development of the software and the community. The community behind LibreOffice is super, super important. It's nice to have millions of users, but if nobody's contributing anything, then we just have software that goes nowhere, yeah. It's great to use, it's free software, it respects our freedoms, but it doesn't do anything if we don't have a community. So we try to get more people to use this to move to free software and get the benefits of free software, but yeah, we also need, want people to contribute as well. So we do this with events, sharing knowledge as well by creating our wiki, maintaining our wiki and our blogs, mentoring new contributors as well. Like when I was talking to Ravi before, trying to build up an Indian community as well. These are all things we do and the infrastructure. Yeah, we need, we need computers, servers, build bots, everything to run the LibreOffice project as well. So that's, yeah, we value openness and transparency as well. We are a non-profit foundation in Germany, which means we're very independent, we're independent from a single sponsor. We can't be dominated by a company or anything like that. We are a fully independent non-profit. Most of our income at the Document Foundation comes from people who donate, end users who donate some money when they download LibreOffice. Which is optional of course, yeah, but many people are very, very grateful for what the community does. So they donate 10, 20, $50 euros, $1, $100 sometimes really varies when they download the software or after they've used it for a while. We then take this money, we use it to organize events, maintain our infrastructure, share knowledge as well and keep the LibreOffice community and project strong as well. And we try to lower these entry barriers to joining the community. The LibreOffice, okay, it's a big office suite. It has 7 million lines of source code behind it, the whole recipe behind it. It's a big complicated piece of software. How can we make it easier for users to join in and become contributors as well? So we have different tasks and hackfests where people can program together, workshops as well. So ways to help people make that first step to get over the barrier from being a LibreOffice user to being a contributor, to being part of the community. And not just programming, as I'll talk about, there are many, many ways to contribute to free software projects way beyond just programming. And we work together with other free and open source software projects and entities and communities and organizations as well. So here we are on the GNOME Big Blue Button instance, but we work with the KDE projects and the Pre Software Foundation as well. Oasis is a standards organization that looks after the document format. We have the open document format as well that LibreOffice uses, open data, open standards. And yeah, impress as well here, so the presentation tool. I see a question in chat, but I'll come back to that in a moment. So community, we are a community behind LibreOffice as well. We're not just a few programmers in a room, we are a worldwide community. We have people, supporters, contributors in India and Australia, almost everywhere in the world I think now. I think most countries in the world have some kind of LibreOffice community members. So we try to motivate each other and coordinate as well. Sometimes as a community, as a project, we make mistakes. Yeah, we try something and it doesn't work. So then we learn from that as well. Yeah, nobody's perfect as a community, we're not perfect. So if we try something and then go, ah, okay, that didn't really work, then let's learn from it. And in any big project with lots of people and lots of different ideas and perspectives, there can be tensions as well. If somebody says, we really need this feature now or somebody else says, yeah, but we don't have the people and the resources to work on that feature. There can be discussions. What should we do? What's the right thing to do? There are often different solutions, different ideas, but we talk about things. Or when we have in-person events, a bit difficult now with Corona, but when we have in-person events, we get together and have a drink or some food and chat about ideas. And if we have different ideas, come up with solutions as well. So that's LibreOffice software and a community. And then behind it is the Document Foundation. So this is a legal kind of chart that shows how all of the different bodies in the foundation fit together. So we have the members of the Document Foundation, that's 221 people. This is the big group of people that have the say in the Document Foundation. Anybody can become a member, anybody who contributes to LibreOffice. So 221 people at the moment are members of the Document Foundation. They can vote for the Board of Directors. They can vote for the Membership Committee. They can have a say on the future. And anyone who contributes for six months in any way, marketing, documentation, design, social media, development, of course, they can become members and then help to steer the project, help to decide where the project goes. So I'm a member, of course, as well as being a team member of the Document Foundation. But so we have these different bodies as well, spreading the power around, spreading responsibility, so no group really dominates. And then we have the advisory board as well. So these are organizations, companies that are not an official part of TDF. We have an independent foundation, but they give us advice as well. So a lot of free and open source software related companies or companies active in the free software world are members of our advisory board and they give us advice on what to do. We can learn from other projects as well. So this is the team at the moment, minus one person, but we are a small, the Document Foundation, the actual team of people paid staff is quite small. So this is 10 of us. You can see me there as well, but we're not a big company. We are not loads and loads of people. We all work from home. We meet when we can, when there's not a pandemic as well. But we're very small nonprofits. So like I said, we are not the developers of LibreOffice, but we do things to help development happening. We have Cisco here who works in the QA community and Bugzilla helping contributors, individuals, volunteers to fix bugs as well. Haiko here oversees the UX community, the user experience, the interface design, so that the design community can do their work as well. And documentation here, and Christian here looks after the infrastructure together with Gilhem and Lee's engineer. He makes sure that every six months we have a new brand, new version of LibreOffice with new features. So we're a small team with our own little areas and responsibilities to work, to build the community and make sure people are working well together. And recently Hossein here, Hossein Nurika from Iran joined our team. So now we are 11 people as our developer community architect. So you may be wondering what that means. Well, he is a programmer. He knows C++ source codes, the code behind LibreOffice well, and he is helping new developers to join our community. So if somebody knows how to program knows some C++ code and wants to get involved in LibreOffice, wants to add new features or fix bugs, for instance, but isn't sure where to start because it's a lot of code. So he or she can go to Hossein and say, help me, you know, help me to get started. Where can I start? And Hossein can say, oh, okay, go to this part of the source code, try this. How to submit a patch as well. So he's helping us to bring more developers on board into our community because more developers is always good. Like I said, millions of users is nice, but developers to have more developers is good. So a quick background on where we came from LibreOffice is now just over 11 years old. We started in September 2010. That's when LibreOffice forked off from open office. I'll show you in a moment. LibreOffice as a software project started in 2010. And a couple of years later, 2012, we started the document foundation. So this non-profit foundation as well. And there were lots of decisions at the time. What should be the base of this foundation? In the end, it was Germany. There were lots of reasons. There were lots of community members in Germany as well. And a non-profit foundation in Germany has a lot of stability as well and guarantees that it can be independent. It was a good place to start a foundation. Here we can see how the development went. So there was open office. 20 years ago, open office started as a free software, free and open source project based on something called Star Office. There was Star Office in the 90s, a proprietary office suite. It was bought by a company called Sun Microsystems. They released the source code. They made it free and open source software as open office. Open office carried on for a few years. It was very, very popular. But then Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle and there was some complications in the community. What's the future? Who will own the source code? Who will make sure that the community continues? So around this time, 2010, many, many developers, most of the community said, let's start our own non-profit independent project, LibreOffice and the Document Foundation. And we'll carry on independently there. We will work on LibreOffice. We will accept contributions from companies. Of course, companies in the ecosystem are very, very good. But we want to continue as our own community independent non-profit project. So LibreOffice started and you can see here over the years, many, many major releases every six months, a major release with new features. So it really is the successor to OpenOffice. The last major release of OpenOffice now under Apache was 4.1 in 2014. There have been some minor bug fix updates since then, but they haven't had a new major release, new feature release since 2014. So almost all of the feature work, the development, 99% of the development has been on LibreOffice in the LibreOffice project now as well. So what are we working on? Well, our latest release, our last release a few months ago is LibreOffice 7.2, focusing on performance, compatibility, usability, very, very important features for people, especially compatibility. And then we can talk about chat in a moment. So that was our last major release in August. And we release a new version every six months. So LibreOffice 7.3 will be available hopefully in February 2022, so a few months now. But we always maintain two stable branches of the software. So at the moment we have LibreOffice 7.1 and 7.2 available at the same time. This is quite common in the software world. If you look at some GNU Linux distributions, they do this as well. They have two versions available. So you've got time to jump from one to another. So when we released LibreOffice 7.2, brand new, many new features, very fresh. You have some users who say, well, I really, really don't want to try all the newest things yet. I want to keep going with the older version that's more tested. So I'll use LibreOffice 7.1 for a while, and then I'll jump to 7.2 when it's ready. So we have this overlap. We have the two branches available at any time. So people can choose one that's most suitable for them. Now LibreOffice 7.2 has been available for three months. So it's stable. It's reliable. Everybody can use it as well. One thing we've been working on, our community, our design community has been working on is the notebook bar. So an alternative user interface design based around tabs as well. So when you install LibreOffice, at the moment, it looks like a traditional office suite. It looks with the menu bar and the toolbars and the icons to click at the top. But this is available in the last few releases as an alternative user interface. Some people say a more modern user interface, more familiar for users of other software, but it's an option. We don't want to force anybody to use things. So some people like the notebook bar. Some people say, yeah, I prefer the old, the traditional, the normal user interface. So it can be difficult to keep everybody happy. Everybody has different requirements. People want to use the software in different ways, but we try our best as well. We in the community try to give people what they need. And not many people know this, but there is an online cloud based version of LibreOffice. Although, as we say, as a lot of people say, the cloud just means your data is in someone else's computer, but there are practical things for the cloud for online services. So LibreOffice online is a thing being mostly developed by Collabora, a company in the bigger LibreOffice ecosystem. So you can install LibreOffice online with next cloud or own cloud and other tools on a server, and then people can access the software via a web browser. And it has the same rendering engine, the same drawing system behind it as the desktop application. So all of your documents in LibreOffice online should look exactly the same as in the desktop software as well. The online version doesn't have all of the features of the desktop version yet, but they're getting closer and closer. And yeah, so it's LibreOffice in a web browser, and that's improving as well. So while we're here, let me look at some of the chat here. So one question, how long does it take for LibreOffice to catch up to new features on MS Office and Google Office? You can ask that the other way around. There are features in LibreOffice that MS Office and Google Docs don't have. LibreOffice supports way more file formats, for instance. It runs on more operating systems. It has extra export features built in like EPUB. So we can ask the same, when will they catch up to some of our features? The answer to things like this is features happen when somebody develops them. We are a small team of 10 people. We can't force the community to work on things. So if there is a feature in MS Office that LibreOffice doesn't have, we can't say, oh, we will have it in two months or two years. We are the small foundation. We can't make things happen. What we can do is encourage people to work on these features, give them the help they need to work on these features. Talk to the ecosystem, the companies around LibreOffice that sell extra enhanced versions of LibreOffice with long-term support. We can work with them to implement the new features, but we can't say, oh, we will have this feature in one month or two months. Like other free software projects, it's hard to make a specific roadmap when you rely on volunteers as well. So we try to help make things happen, but ultimately it's up to people who contribute to make the features happen as well. The other one, another question, how do you manage the multiple projects at the Document Foundation and make sure you are getting quality contributions from the community? That's a good question. Yeah, our job is to manage these different projects as well. So when I wake up in the morning, I look at my Thunderbird inbox and I look at IRC and Telegram and mailing lists and all of our different communication channels and see what the projects are doing. And then most of the time they work on their own, they do their work and are happy and that's great. We watch and help if need be, but sometimes they ask us for help. They need infrastructure or they want to organize an event and then we can help them as well. And quality contributions, I think it's the usual software approach, the best things rise to the top. People check each other's contributions as well. People work their way up in the community and get more trusted as they do more and more contributions and then can have more access to make changes. But the community decides. So if somebody has an idea for, let's say, marketing or documentation, we say, great, okay, now do it, do as decide. Go ahead and do it and then let's talk together. And as mentioned, we have our team of people overseeing the different. So we can look at contributions and if something needs to be improved, we can say, ah, okay. Thank you for your contribution, but let's work on it to make it better as well. Another question, is there any support to your and other open source organizations by governments or international agencies like the. It's a good question. More and more we see governments and local governments getting involved. The government of the United Kingdom has standardized on the open document format. So the document format that LibreOffice uses as its native format as well a fully revised format. So that's some support by the UK government, for instance. And a here in Germany, a state in northern Germany wants to switch to LibreOffice and free software GNU Linux eventually as well. So we could call this support as well. And sometimes we get people in our advisory board and financial support that way as well. And I see that some people are talking about this Microsoft Office supporting LibreOffice. So the open document format and that's true as well. Microsoft is part of the panel, looking at the open document format. So I think their newest Microsoft Office really supports open document format 1.3. So, yeah, people have lots of different opinions about Microsoft and understandably given the past relationship with free and open source software. And here a few decades ago when it was it was very, very tense between the free software world and Microsoft. So, you know, just have to see but at least Microsoft Office does support open document. So there's a bit of improvement there as well. Anyway, and I'll answer the question about how I came to TDF at the end. Like many free software projects. There is an ecosystem around LibreOffice as well. So we are the nonprofit independent in the middle but there are lots of companies who make products based around LibreOffice with extra features as well. This is very similar in the Linux world as well and you think you have companies like Red Hat and Canonical. So there's a user who use and develop free software, but they also make products with extra features, long term support options. For instance, so if a big business wants to use free software they get the support or bug fixes, custom bug fixes and other extra features as well. So this is this is part of the LibreOffice project as well the companies who are contributing. They release 70% of the code commits the new changes to the LibreOffice source code, the background to it, were from these companies as well. So the volunteers in LibreOffice do fantastic amazing work and we love them, but we also should credit the these companies in the ecosystem who are paying developers to work on free software because the source code due to the license is free, stays free. So these companies develop LibreOffice, but we all benefit because the features come back into LibreOffice. So thanks to free software and the freedom aspect, everyone benefits. So I think we should give credit to these companies as well who are doing great work on the software. So here for instance, you can see LibreOffice 7.2 hour last release. And the orange here showing lots of work from volunteers in LibreOffice in the LibreOffice project community, fantastic volunteers do amazing work, but also companies around as well, adding a lot of features to LibreOffice. So we want to give them credit as well. So what from the last release or the last two releases we call LibreOffice from the Dockham Foundation LibreOffice community. This is the same LibreOffice as we've always done. Nothing is changing. We are a free and open source software project from a nonprofit organization. This is the full version of LibreOffice. We have no interest in the features. We can't and we wouldn't. Or we don't offer professional support or anything. LibreOffice from us is a community project. And that's what we want to make clear in the name. We don't give technical support. There's only 11 of us with 200 million users. We cannot provide technical support to big companies using LibreOffice. This is a community project and community software. Anybody can use it. Of course, that's the beauty of free software. But we say if a really big company wants to use LibreOffice on 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 computers. Fantastic. Yeah, but they should probably get LibreOffice from the company in the ecosystem to get the extra support to get the things that we at the Dockham Foundation can't do. Also then they contribute back financially. Which means we get more developers working on LibreOffice to contribute new features. So it's similar to other free software projects as well. There's a mixture of community work volunteers. The source code stays free. The freedom aspect of free software stays with us all. But it can be good to have companies working as well paying developers to work on free software. And we all get the features and it makes free software easier to use in large companies if they need long term support versions. So when it all comes together, everybody wins. Let me just check back in on the chat as well. How are you trying to educate people about open office? Trying to include this in curriculum. Well, open office is not from us. Like I said, open office is an Apache project and hasn't had a new release for nearly eight years now. So that's their project. But for LibreOffice in our project, we speak to schools. We give presentations at schools and universities as well. We have flyers that people can give out in their schools and universities showing the importance of free software for students as well. A lot of students get free as in zero cost software from other companies. So they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily interested in the price saving money. But as we know, free software is about way more than money. It's about freedom. It's about user freedom. We try to encourage students and people in schools to use free software like LibreOffice to get their freedoms back, to get control over their data, to study the software, to have documents in a format that respects their freedom as well. Another example, another question here about LibreOffice and the ability to use LaTeX together. A feature request may be a bit of a big issue. Has there ever been a proposal to have LaTeX sing ability inside LibreOffice? Yes. And I think there are many proposals, but again, if nobody does it, there's nothing we can do. We can try to sit down and add the feature, but I'm a very limited time and I'm working on the community of LibreOffice. So there are proposals. There may be extensions for that. There may be extension extensions that implement more LaTeX features and support, but yeah, there are always proposals. There are a huge number of proposals for things in LibreOffice. Ten people in a small nonprofit can't just make them happen. So if somebody wants something, the best thing is they start work on it, make a 0.1 version, at least a prototype, and then encourage more people to get involved, spread the word. We can help to bring more people on board, but proposals, we have lots of feature idea proposals, but we need people to make them happen. Otherwise, we can ask, we can all want a million features, but we can't force anything to happen. So I'm sure there are lots of people who would like more LaTeX support. Yeah, let's work together on finding the people. There are some things we can do. We can blog about it. I can blog about it and say community members would love to have better LaTeX integration with LibreOffice. We can make it happen. But yeah, we can't magically create any features. What are the sources of volunteer contributors? Can you expand on that question please? What do you mean by the sources of contributors? Like where are they from? In the meantime, I'll carry on with some information about what people can do for LibreOffice, what end users can do. We have a website here, whatcanidooforlibreoffice.org, and this asks questions to users. What are you interested in? Are you interested in user experience design and user interface design? As an end user, if you are, you click, yeah, tell me more. Or maybe boring, show me something else. But with this site, we try to guide people to find something they are interested in, something they know about as a user, and then encourage them to become developers. If you are interested in technical writing, maybe you have skills in technical writing, here's how to join our documentation community. Here's a big list of things that people can do. I won't read them all out here. You can have a look around so many things to do inside our project and community. The many of them, most of them are not development. So I mentioned this at the start as well. Development is important for LibreOffice to get new features and bug fixes in the code, definitely. But it's just part of making a good free software project and a good piece of software that people want to use. Documentation, infrastructure, security as well. There are templates and extensions, so many things where people can get involved and make a difference. And they make a huge difference to the whole project. Beyond development, the whole thing that when we have a new version of LibreOffice, yes, it has new features thanks to developers, but it has more translations. Better user interface as well, bug fixes or tests as well, documentation, document format updates, all of these things made for by the community. So I see the question, how do we get the new volunteer contributors? Yeah, good question. I did mention this early on at the start that the things we do to lower the entry barriers to contribution as well. So events, online events or real life events as well, we organize to get contributors on board. That's important. I can jump ahead now a bit more quickly. Yeah, so events is one way we get new volunteer contributors on our website, making it easier for people to join in. So instead of a big page saying, oh, you'd like to contribute something to LibreOffice, sign up for this Git repository and blah, blah, blah. A lot of people get put off by complicated steps to join in. So we try to make that as quick as possible. Send us an email, tell us what you want or what you're missing. We can talk together and make it happen as well. We have events like online events like the month of LibreOffice that we have at the moment on our blog, where we give away stickers and merchandise to people who contribute to LibreOffice. So a bit of a fun way to encourage people to get involved. And one of the biggest ways to answer this question as well, to get new contributors is inside LibreOffice, inside the software, after six months of using it, a small bar appears saying that LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community. Join us and help us to make the software even better. So a little bar appears just once. Yeah, we don't want to annoy people all the time. But the idea is, if you've been using LibreOffice for six months, hopefully you like it. Hopefully you find it useful. And then we just tell people, because a lot of people don't know where LibreOffice is from. We tell them, yeah, this is a community software. This is made by people like you. So if you want, click this button, or just close it, but click this button. And then you come to our website and then we show all the different ways people can join in. So I hope that answers the question of it. It is hard. It's, it's, that's, it's a challenge to get new contributors in. Yeah, everybody, most people have busy lives and everybody has other problems in the world is has some problems at the moment. So it's hard to convert users into contributors, but with 200 million LibreOffice users, if we can convert 0.1% of them, you know, that's, that's a good start. And contributing to free software, as I mentioned at the start, is good for free software, good for society as a whole, the benefits of free software, the user freedoms, for freedoms that you, that you know about to change and study and modify software. But it can benefit the contributors. So people can develop their skills and get experience. If you're between jobs, you're looking for a new job. You think, yeah, okay, might be a couple of months until I get another job. But I want to keep doing things as well. Join a free software project. Help out. You can do something. You can then put it on your CV, yeah, a document to say, look what I did in between jobs I was working on this software and documentation design, whatever. And then it looks really good as well for yourself, building up your skills. Making a big difference. Now, if you contribute something to LibreOffice, you will benefit hundreds of millions of users as well. So you can improve something on the user interface that goes into the next version, and then millions and millions, tens of millions of people will get that new feature or that change or that fix, and they will benefit from it. You know, that's, that's really nice personally to help out and then realize your work is being used by millions of people around the world. It's really making a difference. So how can people find us in the LibreOffice community? We have our communication channels, mailing lists. We have some people don't like mailing lists much these days. They want something more real time and interactive like IRC or Matrix. We have matrix channels and IRC channels bridged Telegram as well because I know a lot of people prefer not to use Telegram, but we have to also reach out to people where they are. We use services like Twitter to reach out. Some people might say, yeah, and then they're not free software, fully free software services like Mastodon. Yes, that's true. But there's the balance here. We need to, in order to get new contributors, we have to find them where they are. And let's face it, a lot of people are on Twitter and Facebook and so but inside the project we use, we use free software tools for communication as well. So our mailing lists and so forth are hosted on our infrastructure as well. The Matrix ID of LibreOffice, I'm not sure, I'd have to check that afterwards. We use native language projects. LibreOffice is available in 114 languages, I think, and there are many more being added as well. So to anybody watching this now live or later, if LibreOffice is not available in a language you know, but you want to make it available, let me know and we can work together to make it happen. And we are not financially motivated to only make LibreOffice available in certain languages for the big languages. Yeah, we can do what we want. And we have LibreOffice available in like native tribal languages in South America that the communities they work on. So that's fantastic. Yeah, that helps the local people in those communities, especially if a lot of them are new to computers or they're trying to build IT education in those areas. They can use LibreOffice in their own language. They're not forced to use it in one of the big languages. So that's super important to us as well. We have LibreOffice in over 100 languages and we have calls inside the community where people where we talk on the phone or jitsie or big blue, big blue button in our different communities QA documentation and so forth. And we have events, not so many in real life at the moment with the pandemic but hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, next year, we'll have some more as well. And I think I have, I have a few photos from our meetups in the last few years so this was the LibreOffice conference 2016 in Burno in the Czech Republic. This was my first LibreOffice conference. So to answer the question earlier, how did I join? This is when I joined. I saw that the Document Foundation was looking for somebody to help out with marketing and community as well. They had a job offer. It went around the free software websites and read it at the usual places and I saw, yeah, the Document Foundation needs somebody to work on marketing and I thought, well, okay, I've been a journalist in the new Linux free software world for many, many years. I love free software. I'm passionate about it. I'm interested in marketing and how to spread the message about something, how to get people involved. I am a geek. I am a programmer but I like to do more than just programming. So I applied to the Document Foundation and yeah, lucky me, they gave me a job. So I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm, I have a job working on with free software. So I'm happy about that. This was a meetup of the German speaking community. Also two years ago now with the, or maybe, no, this was March last year just before the lockdowns and the pandemic really started. So German community members. These are some Albanian community members here. They work on translating Libra office into the Albanian language as well, a young diverse community as well. Obviously, software communities tend to be more men as well and often of a certain age. So it's great younger people and a mixture of guys and women as well all working together in the community. So diversity is important, something we try to, to improve as well. Just have a great mixture of people instead of such a focus. That's the Brazilian Portuguese community here and this a few years ago was a Nepalese localization sprint for Libra office so for a lot of you guys, a bit north up there in Nepal. They had an event a few days, a few years ago where they got together and they translated Libra office into the Nepalese language, which was wonderful. It was great. We helped them where we can but they did this they organized it themselves they, they got together and made something happen, which is fantastic. And this is what we'd love to see more of so to those of you they're listening in India and anywhere else in the world, of course, if you want to organize something like this. Let us know. We have a budget. So some financial resources that we can use to help here. We can't do everything but we may be able to help with travel arrangements after the pandemic maybe but if you want to get some people together to work on a translation or another project. We may be able to help you financially as the document foundation to bring people together. We can send you materials merchandise like a big banner here for instance. We can give you infrastructure if you need a server virtual machine to to work on things we can help you. That's what we're there for. Yeah, not just to develop Libra office but to make the whole work together so like the Nepalese community here if you have ideas for projects, let us know. We can help out where possible. Yeah, we have limited resources as well but we love to to make things happen so let us know. And this was the photo from our last conference in 2019 the Libra office conference in Almerea in Spain. So the last time we were all together in person, not all of us the community has two 300 people but the people who could get together back then in Spain to talk about Libra office talk about free software technology projects as well. All the things that we love to have fun have great food as well have Spanish food going into the town. Wonderful events in person events. So hopefully, hopefully more of those events still to come. Yeah, and that's it for my talk. I still have a few minutes for any questions or feedback. Let me know. It's been good to hear your to read your comments in the chat. If anybody has any other things they want to share them. I can stay around for the next like five minutes. Let me check the other chat. Libra office impress and the remote app is so cool. Yeah, rubbish. That's true. Yeah, the remote app is is cool. Yeah. Yeah contributors we've talked about. Yeah. You folks are doing great work says here. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Yeah, we we appreciate it. Everybody works super hard in the community to to make things happen as well. So we appreciate your thanks but it's the it's the 200 300 400 people who come and go in the Libra office project that do the amazing things. So, I hope I've been able to give an overview of what we do what the document foundation does. Which area here says I am working with the FOS United Foundation, which is a nonprofit foundation that aims at promoting and strengthening the free and open source software ecosystem in India. That sounds that sounds great. We should talk about that as well. Ravi has my email address so let me know about this. We can work together. We can help to spread the word about the things we're doing as well. Yeah, promotion of each other's things attend events as well in the future when events are possible. Yeah, it'd be great to have community Indian community members come here. Maybe some of us can visit India. I absolutely love Indian food so any any reason for me to come to India is good. But yeah, let's let's work together with that. I will be in contact with Ravi as well about the building an Indian community and let's let's keep going. So thanks everybody. Thanks Ravi. Thanks Mike for getting for letting us know about the Libra office and the community behind us. I didn't know a lot of things that I know if they're cleared from the top and yeah, it was very good. Glad to hear it. Yeah. Good to be here. I will share I will share Mike's like email address and you can contact him and also if you can share metrics address of your Libra office, then I will circulate in our circles. I think most of us use metrics. Shall I send you these slides as well, Ravi the PDF. Yeah, you can send. So I will circulate. You send to camp at fxca.in or maybe me also. Okay, I'll send the slides to that address then. Yeah. Please send my address of Libra. I think we can close now. So thank you all for joining. Thank you Mike. Thanks guys. Yeah, have a great rest of the camp and yeah, if you I'm always happy to come and join events in the future. So just let me know you have anything. Yeah. Thanks everybody. Take care. Bye bye.