Deeper, Better, Farther: Growing the Community & Improving LibreOffice

There is something truly comforting in observing vibrant communities such as the one of LibreOffice. The project is growing, not just in developers but in adoption as well: more users as well as more localizations are a visible sign inside the project. All this is not only thanks to our good name and reputation; it is because as we are well into our fourth year of existence, it is important to realize that communities scale as much as their production and communication infrastructure is able to grow and perform its duties. Two words are of peculiar importance here: Production & Communication. In a Free and Open Source Software project, these two functions are tightly connected. The project enables the software production at the same time it enables communications between its members. Conversely, you cannot have a developers, users, or QA mailing list for instance, without relying on an existing code repository of some sort, otherwise you’re only doing vapourware (and vapourware only needs a database of press contacts, but no real mailing list).

Scaling up the production and communication infrastructure ultimately amounts to improve the software quality, featureset or both, and making the project contributors communicate more effectively, in between themselves and outside of the project as well. We have entered a period of fast growth inside LibreOffice; growth in terms of quality improvement, in terms of features, but in terms of what the Document Foundation can do, thanks to broader resources than when it first started. What this does not mean however is that our infrastructure team has free time available; but it means it can do more and accomodate more needs than previously. Here are a few concrete actions the project has been deciding recently and/or committing itself to in a systematic way since a few months:

• Hackfests: Of course these are not new, but looking on this list you will notice that they do now happen on regular and close intervals. These are actually very inclusive events and are open to anyone who wish to learn development on LibreOffice as well as joining the QA team and even how to contribute designs to the project. The next step being to go “transcontinental”, with hackfest taking place in the Americas, Europe, and Asia for instance. And for what it’s worth, we are having our hackfest in Paris this Friday…
• More localizations: more and more teams of localizers apply to have LibreOffice localized in their own language. It does not stop there though, as we also see an increase in new openings for native-language projects, meaning that these teams will go beyond localization to serve users in their native language, promote LibreOffice locally, etc.
• RedMine. Everywhere. All the time. With various teams come various needs, many different habits. Some will use wikis extensively, some others won’t. But many of them, when they’re not developers, have trouble actually coordinating and keeping track of their own project. After extensive tests the answer is RedMine. The Infra team has a dedicated RedMine instance for anything such as events planning to website management. As a side note, our Bugzilla is now used only for LibreOffice development and not anymore for the website, infrastructure or project management. RedMine tends to be easier to use, more adapted to a range of uses broader than software development, and bundles several tools such as wikis, gantt chart, issues tracking, etc.
• Sane files repository with OwnCloud. We now have our own. Enough with files lost on the wiki….
• A project-wide newsletter, gathering the quality throughout the project, dubbed LOWN (LibreOffice Weekly Newsletter) has been started and will now become a collaborative, online effort that will help circulate information around the community.
• Soon, we will have a multilingual blog planet derived from the one used by OpenSuse.

In terms of processes, two specific improvements must be listed:

• Regular QA bughunting sessions, allowing not just to tackle quality issues but to attract newcomers to the project -thanks Robinson!
• Regular release coordination and readiness for localizers and native-language projects – thanks Sophie!

All this ultimately leads to a breadth of improvement, in the community and in the final stages of the 4.3 release, a major one to date. Check out the first draft of the release notes here. 

Ultimately however, all this would not work without the team of LibreOffice contributors who help make LibreOffice what it is today: a fun project, fantastic people, and a free office suite that is the best productivity tool you can find around.