As it turned out these native-language community were quite successful. Of course there were quite some differences among them. Some were very well grown and active communities mirroring the “central projects” in almost every aspect. At the other end of the spectrum there were communities that were little more than (useful, but small) localization teams. What was very successful about them was that it proved to me a framework that was flexible enough to accommodate almost every type of team or organizations, and that on top of this it worked as an effective tool to spread the usage of the software while granting each team’s “home rule”.

There were, however, some instances for which the native-language projects prove to be inefficient. These cases are worth pointing out as they do cover populations that tend to be rather computer literate. The case in point is the English speaking world. One could basically square it down to this: anywhere else, native-language projects worked (and often extremely well) but in English speaking areas. Certainly, the difference between these areas and the ones where native-languages project are striving is rather clear: English speaking volunteers do not need to replicate, translate nor adapt materials and software that are obviously already available. From a project management point of view, there’s less to do if you live in Oregon than if you live in Portugal. Perhaps all the tasks needed to provide both the software and the support in one specific language are enough to force existing volunteers to structure themselves. Perhaps cultural differences come into play. At any rate we cannot satisfy ourselves with the situation that came to be since the early days of the OpenOffice.org project and that seems to continue inside the LibreOffice project.

We thus need to grow the LibreOffice community in places such as North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. How could we do this? How do we start? One simple starting point is to not think in terms of structure: native-language projects seem to work elsewhere, but not for these places. This means that we need to “start at the beginning”, and that would entail to nurture local communities of developers, testers, local volunteers working on marketing, users support, etc.

A first step in the right  direction would be to organize a small scale event to meet the interested people; this event would be very much a gathering of local people interested in knowing more about the project and how they could help. A hacking session on one side a community workshop on the other; food, drinks…. human contact matters (probably even more so with goodies). There’s no need to make it too formal.

What we should expect from such a meeting is the starting point for people to take interest in what they could be achieving inside the LibreOffice project. It’s one thing to know that somewhere, on the wiki, there’s a list of things to do. It’s another thing to discuss about them face to face. It motivates people, and they feel that we (the LibreOffice folks) want them to be part of the community. Of course similar meetings may very well be repeated once or twice. In the end it comes down to resources from the Document Foundation and the local groups. But I’m confident we can get something going, possibly this year in North America. At least we’ll try, and if we fail, it’ll be next year.

See you on the next side  of the Atlantic!

More information available on the Document Freedom website

Other links of interest:

• OpenDocument Format Information site (OASIS)
• LibreOffice
• PDFReaders

The process the contributors survived experienced has however shown its  limits. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with any of its steps: it’s pretty much that all the steps are not well coordinated, and the end result is that we can do much better to streamline the release process in terms of coordination across the board, from the estimated release date, the ongoing RCs to be tested, to the marketing and the design team deliverables. I realize that I might be popping the bubble of many of our loyal followers, but we need to improve the communication across the teams. And if you thought that the LibreOffice release process worked a bit like this:

Well, it works rather like this:

We are thus launching a discussion at various levels of the community to see how we can improve the way we work together, and this is already giving some results. But we need to make sure each team is fully included and synced to the release, and that the issues appearing on one end of the community get properly handled and communicated to the other relevant parts of the community. The silver lining, I think, is clear. Taking a step back it’s obvious we have grown so much in terms of community and project that we can no longer make sure just a few of us push on all the right buttons: there are simply so many of them now, and the reason there are so many is that we have grown dramatically in two years, even more so than what we had thought. Time for a scale up.

Stay tuned!

seagulls from Mato Atom on Vimeo.

The first place you should go before the release date is the release notes on our wiki. They are the most detailed and human readable page you can check at this stage. As you can see there are quite a lot of new features and bugfixes that come with this release, but there are also important elements that one may miss by just looking at the least of items there. Among these ones two are of strategic importance:

• Major changes in the API: They are listed in this section, but what this really means is that it is the most important API cleanup that has ever occured since the beginning of… OpenOffice.org 1.x . This will allow, with time, for the introduction of deeper changes and a more powerful API. But it also means that, while the API is becoming more powerful and easier to tap into, new possibilities for extension developers will rise, with its set of changes and incompatibilities. On a more abstract level, these changes also mark a more radical departure from the OpenOffice.org codebase, and it is now becoming quite difficult to just assume that because OpenOffice.org, Apache OpenOffice behave in one specific way LibreOffice would do just the same. Of course the API changes do not make the whole work themselves, but the work we started with the 3.4 branch is paying off: LibreOffice 4.0 is becoming a different animal, and that comes with its own distinct advantages while clearly showing our ability as a community to innovate and move forward.
• The rebase “for one very, very last time” on the Apache OpenOffice codebase is enabling Libreoffice to have a very clear and clean story on licensing. Essentially The Document Foundation had to use the license from its upstream, aka OpenOffice.org. This license, the LGPL v3 is a very good license, but it is neither evolutive nor exactly the one(s) we wanted. We were thus left in the awkward position to use the LGPL code and ask for any new contribution to use the GPL v3+ and the MPL licenses. The GPLv3+ is the standard Free Software License, but if you notice the “+”, it also lets the code evolve with the license (to the v4, or v5 for instance). The MPL (Mozilla Public License) is a nifty copyleft and Free Software license that has two big advantages: anything coming from the Apache-licensed code can be turned automatically into MPL licensed code; its  second benefit is that this license enables us to upload LibreOffice on commercial App Stores such as the Apple App Store and Google Play, and as you may have heard this is quite important since we are developing a tablet version of LibreOffice (alongside specific tools such as the remote control for Impress on Android). Now because of all this, using the codebase that exists at the Apache Software Foundation and relicensing it under a MPL license brings us real benefits but also creates a very clean and clear licensing scheme.

These two major changes -there are others of course- make this release quite exceptional. In a sense, the 4.0 is actually an existential release, as it marks the departure from the past, and a major change in our licensing . It is also a release that is the result of the work and contribution of a very large community of developers, localizers, QA testers, marketers, documentation writers, designers, and the end result, being more than the sum of all the contributions, will be a hallmark in community developed software.  The 4.0 is not just an update, it represents a deep change for LibreOffice and enables us to come closer to fulfilling our mission: to create the tools for knowledge and the instruments of freedom.

1. Are you a contributor? A general overview on what you can contribute when you’re not a developer.
2. Where can you get – and provide – user support ?
3. How to contribute documentation to the LibreOffice project.
4. Contribute to the marketing efforts : a long post that should be put in context with my own “Proceedings from the Marketing Strategy Workshop” .
5. Contribute Design, artwork, and User Experience work.
6. Join the QA (Quality Assurance) Team : Possible contributions to QA are not just welcome, you would not imagine the range of options you have if you want to contribute there.
7. Join the Infrastructure team : The Document Foundation maintains and grows its  own infrastructure both for the project’s activity but also when it comes to downloads. In two years the infrastructure has become a project on its own. If you have the soul and temper of a sysadmin, read this page.
8. Updated: Localization : all about the Localization processes and release-related work.
9. Updated: Cross-communication: a general overview on specific cross-community communication channels

You will notice that these blog posts tend to go from the less technical (in theory) to the most technical. This is meant and it’s good pedagogy. Thank you Sophie for this invaluable series of articles!

]]> http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/11/16/sgauti-digest/feed/ 1 http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/11/11/terranovadigitalreport/ http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/11/11/terranovadigitalreport/#comments Sun, 11 Nov 2012 18:41:57 +0000 Charles http://standardsandfreedom.net/?p=622 Last Wednesday I was one of the speakers at an event organized by the french Terra Nova Foundation. The event itself was the publication of its much anticipated report on the state of “digital France”, which really means that the report covers a broad range of topics from I.T industry to digital rights, intellectual property, citizenship, education and culture in the digital age.  The Terra Nova foundation is a french think-tank that has a progressive leaning and is one of the main source of inspiration of the current french government.

I had had a series of interviews, alongside twenty other people in order to write this report. The participants of the event were the actual authors of the report and a few interested parties (including myself). While the report, as I wrote earlier, covers an impressive number of topics you may think it would end up being vague or at best a manifesto of sorts. But this report did not fall in any of these traps: for every point discussed inside one will find one or several tasks or policy recommendation.

But the most surprising, however, is a few key ideas that outline a forward-looking report and a great document that can lead to fruitful political discussions for France. The way these ideas resonate with current topics of digital policy topics make it an important and serious piece of work, but what it suggests and affirms as values and principles could serve as the cornerstone for the digital future of Europe. Here are a few of these points that were outlined on Wednesday:

• Digital technologies can help grow the economy in a sustainable way
• Digital technologies are now an invaluable part of our lives and businesses
• Digital technologies are changing our cultures, and the way we live them
• Digital technologies, through the sheer amount of data it generates are a fundamental tool to keep records of our cultures.
• Digital technologies are reshaping -or rebuilding- the way we relate to one another, thus reinveting the social tissue and fabric of our nations.

But in order for this to become a full reality, several points should be considered:

• Free Software should be at the center of these digital technologies
• Free Software is not just a matter of reducing costs, it’s its intensively social, participative nature that permeates both topics of public interest and the way we create “cultural goods” and keep record of our cultural data
• OpenData generated and published by the public sector should come in open, standardized format and belong to the public domain or be licensed under a Creative-Commons-like license.
• Copyright and Intellectual property should be rethought.
• Countries should reclaim their digital independence and sovereignty. This means that they should be able to master their I.T infrastructure, make bold policy choices in order to provide their citizens and businesses the tools they need to work, grow, learn, think and communicate without foreign interference. The case of a few countries such as Brazil was discussed.
• The public sector should become more friendly both towards entrepreneurs and NGOs who develop and expand the digital space, from Free Software development projects to digital communities producing and formating knowledge and culture (i.e Wikipedia). The case of the Document Foundation choosing Germany instead of France for legal convenience was discussed as well.
• The governance of the internet, both on a national and global scale, should be changed. In France one agency should provide guidance to ISPs and grant users’ privacy while making sure that the neutrality of the network, interoperability and any form of censorship remains  and stays prohibited.
• The Internet should remain open and neutral. No form of censorship or intellectual property regime can be justified in regard of the open and neutral nature of the Internet.

It is to be hoped that this report will be read and understood, both in France and abroad…

]]> http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/11/11/terranovadigitalreport/feed/ 0 http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/10/21/marketing-workshop-2012/ http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/10/21/marketing-workshop-2012/#comments Sun, 21 Oct 2012 13:38:52 +0000 Charles http://standardsandfreedom.net/?p=615 On Thursday late afternoon we had a great Marketing and Strategy Workshop. The session was chaired by myself and Italo Vignoli, and Florian Effenberger’s presentation on the LibreOffice’s “Anthill” had been merged to the workshop. This allowed us to discuss the marketing strategy and community building for almost two hours. I believe the session was quite productive, and in many ways proved to be an eye-opener for many people in the room (including myself).  This session’s results are a good base to a rework of our marketing activities, at least the marketing/product/community  aspects of the question. I will be highlighting the major points that have been made during the session and as they were very much brought forth by the participants in the room, do not hesitate to let me know if I have forgotten other elements and points you think were important as well in our discussion. I would like to thank the participants for their precious feedback and participation, as well as their humor and cheerful spirit.

The scope of our discussion

We did not get out of the session with a marketing strategy (we might have needed about two more hours at least for that) but we did get out with a serious base to elaborate a strategy, and a general framework for marketing.

• We will not be marketing a product (i.e the binaries)  but will “market everything and everyone inside the LibreOffice project”. 
• Our core values as a project do not rest in a specific product’s positioning; don’t look for one, you will not find it. But rather, our goals and the baseline of our message is specifically described in the first document that was ever released by the Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project the very day they became public: it is our Next Decade Manifesto. It is likely that some, if not a large part of the people interested in marketing LibreOffice may never are read it, and it’s all right, but this manifesto very much describes who we are, what we want to do in absolute non-technical terms. The general idea, then, is that the marketing team should elaborate specific messaging on top of the ideas expressed in the manifesto and encompass LibreOffice as a project, not as a product.
• We need to be more structured in our approach and our contributions. At the moment, there are only a few marketing volunteers but certainly nothing that comes close to a team. We will start structure our work towards that goal from now on.
• We do not have a market, just like we do not have a product. But we do have a community and we have a project. This point implies a real departure from traditional marketing. One of them is that, while we have clear criteria for TDF membership, we should also make people feel part of our community, and once they are turn them into actual contributors. This is a key idea, not just because we are in need of volunteers in specific areas of our project: but also because this is the way we will grow our marketshare  community .

Specific ideas

• Starting from the Next Decade Manifesto document might make some people think our messaging will be more political. At least I was among the ones who made that observation (don’t forget to check the video stream of the session).  This may not end up being the case as the Manifesto does not attempt to make political points: it outlines what the LibreOffice project stands for, so its values are consubstantial to the project and the software itself.
• The exact expression of the messaging might end up being very different from one local teams to the other. As an example, while the values might be communicated in the same way across several local teams (we need to find another name than the old ‘native-lang’ for them) the new features that are deemed important may vary: the French team might not care the least about improvements to the CTL stack but the Japanese, and others, might well consider this one major feature for them.
• While the whole conversation may seem to have been stratospheric it did hit on very concrete points as well: we need more volunteers and more promotional materials. For instance, we need to make sure that we have a reliable team who will be in charge of designing and publishing the best or most prominent features of the major LibreOffice versions; we need people who are able to maintain the events calendar (not just Marc ) and people who can draft press releases together with Italo. I’m sure I’m missing at least two or three items in this line of thought…
• We need to be doing something about the Download page. It is not just about the presentation or making sure there’s no mistake: it’s also about relieving Christian Lohmaier and Eric Christian. The entire download process cannot rely just on two people.
• We need to think about engaging people in the community when they’re downloading LibreOffice. It might just be one small action, i.e “tell your friends about LibreOffice”, but that does help create the feeling that the new user is part of the community, among other possible things.
• The marketing team should act as an information broker outside and inside the LibreOffice project: connecting various parts of the project (for instance local teams) together and spreading relevant information is key to keep the cohesion and improve the understanding of what’s going on.
• We also need to reframe our activities and be actually active. For instance, stopping the recurring discussion on the two stable branches of LibreOffice is a requirement: the marketing list is not made for complaints or the expression of everyone’s ideas on everything and the kitchen sink.
• Last but not least the website’s design will have to be gradually reinvented. The marketing team should be an important stakeholder in this conversation.

Please let me know if I should add some more points to this list. I look forward to starting the marketing team for LibreOffice soon!

The work that has been achieved in two years has been nothing short of amazing. The community has grown beyond what we, the first founders of the project, thought it would grow. Obviously, we did quite a few things right, and also a few things went the wrong way. But we owe  our success to the the community of all those who supported us and contributed to the LibreOffice  project in big and small ways. To all the community, today is your anniversary, today is your day!

 One word of importance is in order. While we are right to celebrate this day, I feel it is also important to look ahead at the challenges we must face. The fundraising we will launch on Monday is one aspect of this and, if done right, will help specific issues and projects. But today, since I have mentioned the community, I would like to stress that while the community is our greatest asset, it is also the most fragile one. During two years we made sure the development part of the community was given absolute priority, and the results speak for themselves. 540 hackers are not easily found. Much in the same way, the other parts of the community, the localizers, the documentation writers, the QA testers, the designers, the marketeers deserve more attention: if we are half as successful with them as we were with developers, we will bring the LibreOffice  projects to unexpected heights.

I will make it my primary goal this year, to help the community, primarily the marketing one (I can’t be everywhere) but also other teams, to make sure  communication flows the right way and contributions are acknowledged and integrated. And to start with the marketing, we now ought to put in place a real marketing team. We miss structures, processes, content. All this is  fixable and we should not be too hard on ourselves: we got busy with plenty of other urgent items. In fact, one of things I learned with the LibreOffice project is that one can indeed be in “emergency mode” for two years. (If you don’t believe me, ask  Florian Effenberger). But we need to work at it to make sure we have a fully functioning project and a community that works and fully grows. That’s this year’s challenge: Scale Up & Community Process. Meanwhile, I wish you all a happy birthday. “Freedom is marching and nothing can stop it. “

]]> http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/09/28/two-years/feed/ 1 http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/09/09/software-freedom-the-status-quo/ http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/09/09/software-freedom-the-status-quo/#comments Sun, 09 Sep 2012 13:33:20 +0000 Charles http://standardsandfreedom.net/?p=604 Next Saturday, the 15th of September, we will all celebrate the Software Freedom Day 2012. As usual, it will be a worldwide event with lots of big and small conferences, parties and presentations happening all around the globe and driven by teams of volunteers. Such a day highlights the momentum of the FOSS community and the importance of Free Software, and it has done so for several years now with a growing success.

I wish to seize this opportunity to point out an often less discussed aspect of Free Software. While I’m not sure it was fully intended in the first place -it obviously was somehow- Free Software carries the important ability to break the status quo in various fields related to software. I have been discussing here in various instances how Free Software helps creating a level-playing field for competitors and how this ultimately benefits to software users (customers or not). As it turns out, Free Software breaks the status quo in markets that are rigged or de-facto monopolized and this is something that is now known. But what is less known and understood is the ability of Free Software to break the status quo even among large software vendors and established players, may they be customers, service providers, regulators or otherwise.

This is a pattern that seldom gets picked by blogs or by journalists: even to this day, where you will hear that FOSS is definitely an important part of the ecosystem (and it is!), the temptation to control Free & Open Source Software is still prevalent among large vendors. Of course the kind of control may be very different from one project to another. It ranges from subtle (and quite acceptable) influence to de-facto lock-in. There are many shades of grey in this area. In this regard, Software Freedom does not preclude such control and arm-wrestling on a software project, as it does not mandate a specific way to develop software. It does however provide anyone with the necessary willpower and focus to get rid of any party’s influence or control on the software in question. Whether that party ends up mending its ways or the software gets forked and its community relocated is not the point. The important thing is that Software Freedom does not bode well for entities willing to control software development projects even when that’s done in public. If the actual agendas and commitment of a software project’s contributors are not communicated clearly, the confidence in the project itself will quickly become problematic, and ultimately the sanction will be clear: whatever the community chooses for itself, whatever the formal outcome of this choice, the entire value of the community and much, if not all of the value of the software itself will disappear from the vendor’s hands. Instead what might be left is often a set of liabilities no one really wants to deal with.

Because of this, Software  Freedom has the disturbing power to break the status quo: it flies in the face of established fiefdoms, zones of influences and strongholds. Because of this, Software Freedom is dangerous to a few, yet beneficial to many. We, at the Document Foundation, have learned and known this truth since our inception. That’s why we must protect and promote Software Freedom. Next Saturday will be a great opportunity to contribute to this effort. Join the movement! Because today more than ever, Software Freedom matters.