LibreOffice and The Document Foundation continue to grow, with a succession of events especially in Europe that left me lagging substantially in reporting back here.
LibreOffice conference 2012
In no particular order, three weeks ago, the 2nd LibreOffice conference concluded in Berlin. It took place at the conference center of the German ministry of Economics and Technology, clearly one of the best locations I’ve ever been for such an event.
Below you see the reinforced organizer team’s swag production line on Tuesday morning, in a hurry to equip the late-arriving green LibreOffice conference backpacks with giftware. In the end, we were lucky and all was ready & done for the registration at Wednesday morning.
Tuesday swag production
Tuesday afternoon then had a number of meetings, including TDF board and ESC. Below you see Italo with Olivier and Leif in the background, getting ready for the annual in-person board meeting.
Italo at the board meeting
For me, the conference was stressful and terrific at the same time – and we were more than grateful that it went so smoothly and successful in the end. A million hat tips to our organizing team, lead by Jacqueline, and to the two federal ministries for co-hosting. Most rewarding again for me, was meeting all the wonderful people from the community in person. Below you can see those of the roughly 180 that were still present on Friday evening.
Group picture
As we speak, the organizer and video teams are still busy populating the LibOCon 2012 reviews page with the slides and video footage; once that’s concluded there’ll be a separate announcement.
openSUSE conference 2012
SUSE hackers at work
Team diner in Prague
After that, the SUSE crowd migrated a few hundred kilometers to the south, into the beautiful city of Prague (one would think, into warmer climate – but nope, while I was out in tshirt in Berlin, Prague had us stay inside hacking, with single-digit temperatures and drizzling rain). There, we attended both the openSUSE and the SUSE labs conference, and had some more focused team allhands sessions.
Great to see the many excellent SUSE hackers again, and to spend facetime especially with the LibreOffice team.
LibreOffice QA weekend
QA weekend
Pizza for QA volunteers
And even earlier, already end of September, the German-speaking community had their annual QA weekend meeting, at the lovely Linux Hotel in Essen, Germany. Was very happy to meet our QA volunteers in person there, sometimes for the first time, as with Florian Reisinger, who very energetically led through most of the QA topics. I can’t enough stress the importance of talking to people face2face every once in a while, we sorted out a number of issues there, that I believe would have festered much longer otherwise. With the ongoing fund raising for 2013, TDF will continue to organize those and similar events, and predominantly help with travel sponsoring for community members.
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