Design Team Kick-Off Step 3: We are the Design Team

Hi all,

a while ago I summarized the Design Team's current status of work - now I'd like to talk about the members of the Design Team. Who are they, what are they interested in, and how do they look like? Here we go ...

To get to know each other, we've asked everybody for some insights like "What are you interested in?", and compiled the Design Team member list. On this list, you'll also find some links to user pages with even more stuff you ever wanted to know (or maybe not).

What I can say is, that I'm pretty amazed who we are ...

• Some members have a professional usability and/or user experience background
• Highly skilled artists are with us - also with professional background
• There are new faces with lots of fresh ideas, and also long-term community members

Not to forget the "lurkers" who are subscribed to our mailing list. Some of them mentioned they want to follow our work first ... of course! I consider them more than important, since I hope they'll help us to keep some connection across the mailing lists (e.g. mentioning not to be missed topics on the development mailing list, or on the local mailing lists). By the way, the number of subscribed users is 106 (2011-02-07)

If you want to know more, see Kick-Off Wiki Page: Introducing the Team Members.

Well, it seems we are getting ready for some serious work ... :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

FOSDEM 2011 - summary

Hello world,

as others already pointed out, the FOSDEM was a great experience ... especially since I've enjoyed to see most of the TDF guys. So here some more pictures, and finally the link to my talk.

Experience

We had interesting talks, maybe because it was simple to identify the "green people"?

The developers prepared some USB storage with the complete source code, so that the people hanging around could jump-start to develop LibreOffice. But - apart from the interesting hacks - why should they do that?

As we did some awesome marketing (tm) before, here is another one: "Clothing for Code". So, if people completed an Easy Hack during (!) the FOSDEM, then they got one of those green hoodies.

If we continue with that initiative, we have some more proposals how to call that - summary:

• Hack for a Hoody
• Fashion for a Fix
• Clothing for Code

Rather late, I noticed that I lacked a picture of our devroom ... here is the very last presentation.

Please note, that another awesome marketing tried to support Kendy to get some of the money he privately invested to bring the clothes. It seems that it worked ... he can now go home. Safely :-)

Presentation
I've added my presentation "Kicking off the LibreOffice Design Team to the freshly created Design Team presentations wiki page. So if you want to have a look at it - here are the links: ODP, PDF. A video might be available soon.

Looking forward ... so many trade fairs and conferences to go :-)

Cheers,
Christoph

FOSDEM 2011 - first bits and pieces

Hi guys,

so here are some first impressions from the FOSDEM 2011.

The yesterday's FOSDEM Beerevent ... awesomely crowded, here you side a picture outside the café.

The first "real" day starts with an almost empty booth ...

... so get all the little gadgets ready ...

... unpack the freshly made "Freedom Never Tasted So Suite" shirts ...

... do some awesome marketing ...

... start talking to people to make them aware of LibreOffice ...

... continue to talk and realize that they are aware :-)

Thanks to all who made this possible!

Okay, back to the booth ... just wanted to share some things from the conference. Tomorrow will be even more interesting, since we'll get our Development Room to have some nice presentations.

Cheers,
Christoph

Merry Christmas, Happy Holiday Season!

Hi all,

also from my side Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. I hope you will have some time to take a deep breath, enjoy the time with your family and your close friends.

And - very important to me - my deepest thanks to all people who directly and indirectly supported us to turn LibreOffice into reality. Starting from the developers turning ideas into code, to the people who helped me to "survive" this year by easing my day life :-)

Well, and you may notice that I've disrespected the branding guidelines to make up a small present for you ... ;-)

Some special regards to the OpenOffice.org User Experience team located at Oracle in Hamburg - during the last years, I've usually spend a day or two in January to visit them. This year, I miss the time ... and thus a great opportunity to see them :-(

Cheers,
Christoph

Interviews, and ... Lost in Translation

Great! I just stumbled across the two first interviews that have been conducted with LibreOffice developers. And although I may claim that I've invested quite some time into this project (and it's predecessors), I don't know that much about it's hackers ... and especially the new guys. So please enjoy reading the interviews with Norbert Thiébaud and Joseph Powers. I certainly did :-)

I also enjoyed the interviews done in other projects ... and some days ago, I wanted to share one of the German interviews done with Jacqueline Rahemipour with the rest of the LibreOffice community. But, I got "Lost in Translation".

Here is a part of the German interview published on ubuntuusers.de:

Okay, well, if you prefer other languages, then let's simply state that the original text states "Interview mit Jacqueline Rahemipour". And what happens if you run the Google Translation? Let's see ...

Mmh, now we got the translation including "My name is Joost Andrae". Although Joost is a great guy working for Oracle, what happened here? It seems, that Jacqueline and Joost have run too many QA sessions together :-)

Still wondering ...

Christoph

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday to all the people who helped to grow LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org!

And - personally - a "Thank you for everything!" to all the volunteers and Oracle guys which I met over the past years and which I consider to be my close friends.

And by the way, the graphic (PNG, SVG) can be found on the temporary marketing page in the TDF Wiki. Spread the news ;-)

Cheers,
Christoph

Suspend Mode

Since quite some time we work on The Document Foundation thing ... pretty intensively, if I may say that. So - for me - it's time for suspend mode ... at least for two days. We do have some guests (family), therefore I hope you don't mind if my level of activity decreases a bit (maybe to close to zero *g*).

Thanks to everybody for supporting us ... not only in the meantime! Go on!!!

Cheers,
Christoph

That's what others say: I like the name LibreOffice

In my last blog posting, I explained some background with regard to the name LibreOffice. Today, I just want to quote some of the mails we received on the [tdf-discuss] mailing list ... that made me smile :-)


Jean said ...

If I have to explain to someone what "LibreOffice" means, it's easy:
"Libre means free, as in liberty or freedom."

If I have to explain what "OpenOffice.org" means, it's a much bigger
problem, even without the complication of the ".org" part. Most people
have never heard of "open source" or "open standards" or "open" anything
else. How to explain it in less than ten words? And even if I do, most
people don't care, don't understand why they should care, and think I am
one of those geek fanatics for even talking about it. They shake their
heads and go away.

But "free, as in liberty" they can understand. They are interested,
enough for me to say "you can make as many copies as you like, and give
it away; it's all legal, no hassles."


Soon, Stefan added:

YES! :-)

Formerly, the office was opened, now it´s freed.  ;-)


Martín provided some thoughts, too:


I like the name very much, because it enhances i18n, it is a "more
universal" name, and it shows that multilingualism is important and global
multicultural cooperation is possible, or better, LibreOffice is a fact of
these both issues became reality


Thanks!!!

Christoph

Agreeing on the child's name ... a simple task?

This is my very first blog posting on an account I created quite some time ago ... usually I use the OpenOffice.org UX team blog, but today I'll mainly refer to LibreOffice. So a happy welcome to everybody :-)

So what is this posting about? It is about ...

... more precisely, I would like to talk about the name LibreOffice. There is no doubt that the idea behind The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is very well received, but I do hear some people talking about the suitability of name LibreOffice. And I also heard some name proposals.

Some people stated, that it is hard to spell in some languages (e.g. English), or that people won't get the meaning ("Libre"), or that it just feels uncool in comparison to competitors (Why "Office"?). And some expressed their wish to take part in the early decision process.

Let's start with the latter - everyone we talked with agreed that our ideas that had to be well prepared in advance ... I hope you will agree, too. This preparation led to the "backup name" that allows us to continue working on our beloved project until all trademark questions are finally resolved. You know, we still would like to continue to use it; see also our FAQ. But in any case, we really had to come up with something.

So we picked the very first name that came into mind? At least that is something people seem to think in the discussions. Well, it was somehow different ...


First, we started to collect all requirements for the new naming scheme. As you know, we do talk about the foundation, the software, and all kinds of other stuff (like events, technology, ...). And we work in an international context, with some other friends with us - e.g. BrOffice.org.

We started a huge brainstorming session ... which led to about a hundred names. We discussed many of them, e.g. "FreeOffice" being a good name in some regions, but for some people, "free" means "cheap". There were also some really weird name proposals, I don't want to state here. Okay, I thought having something like "Godzilla Foundation" would be a great addition to the Mozilla Foundation. Huge and cuddly ;-)

If the name seemed somehow usable, we started some very basic research - e.g. if the name implies strange meaning in other languages, or if the most common Internet domains are available. So we could shorten our list until only very few items were left.

The next step was to make sure that the name really fits to our goals. You remember the mission of our temporary steering group? Just a snippet: "[...] protect past investments by building on the solid achievements of our first decade [...]". Well, if we want to have some continuity, is it correct to use a completely different name to frighten users? No; we kept the "Office" part.

Historically, the ".org" part in OpenOffice.org confused many users - they thought that this is a domain name instead of the name of a free software. Even editors dropped it to avoid confusion within their readership - but how to communicate a name to the public if it doesn't appear in magazines or blogs? So we kept the ".org", but only for the domain name.

We went on in our list and we decided to go for "liberty", "libre", and therefore "LibreOffice". For this name, we did quite intensive research on already filed trademarks, the required URLs in the different countries, available social media names and tags, ... even if (slightly) mis-spelled URL locations might cause people to get lost in the web. Fortunately, everything went very well with this risk estimation.

This whole process took weeks ... and we were very serious about it (although I also had some doubts and proposed different names). We knew about some tiny compromises, but we really think that our name proposal does make sense for us being a Free Software community, that it expresses continuity, and that it is ready-to-serve in the Internet ...

So still having another name proposal? Please think about the implications ... instead, wouldn't it be better to fill the term "libre" with some life? Take part in something very unique? And help to shape something that deserves the name: LibreOffice

Simply join!

Cheers,
Christoph ... who expressed his personal opinion :-)