It’s time for another batch of presentations and workshops from the recent openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020! You can see them in the YouTube playlist, and here are the individual videos (apologies for the not-perfect audio in some places):

Marketing and social media in LibreOffice (Mike Saunders):

openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020: Recruiting for LibreOffice globally and locally through volunteer platforms (Ilmari Lauhakangas):

The history and pre-history of LibreOffice (Michael Meeks):

LibreOffice oss-fuzz, crashtesting, coverity (Caolán McNamara):

Faster Jail Creation with Bind-Mount (Ashod Nakashian):

The ODF TC GitHub (Svante Schubert):

LibreOffice in your browser – WebAssembly & other neat hacks to make that happen (Thorsten Behrens):

The ODF Toolkit (Svante Schubert):

Implementation Detail (Stephan Bergmann):

LibreOffice 7.0, released in August 2020, includes new branding elements for the splash screen and other places, thanks Bayu Rizaldhan Rayes and the Design team. Now Barbara Tostes has made a 3D model for use in Blender, so if you want to make a video or animation about LibreOffice, check it out!

And indeed, if you make any kind of video or tutorial and want us to spread the word, join our marketing mailing list or Telegram channel and say hello. Also take a look at the Design community’s work too. We love having more ideas and feedback!

LibreOffice is way more than just an office suite – it’s a worldwide project and community where people share ideas, build up their skills, and have fun. Today we’re talking to Arnaud Mez, who’s part of the Francophone community and who’s spreading the word about LibreOffice and helping with design…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from the Republic of Congo (the one with Brazzaville as its capital city :-) ). I’m the owner of a small venture called Smarty TC, based in the town of Pointe Noire, the city I live in.

My everyday tasks and duties are exactly similar to my hobbies, as I constantly fight to stay focused on doing only what I love… So I do a lot of reading and listening to music, but beyond that I do a lot of research on the internet in order to keep an average but updated knowledge base. I did sport years ago… ;-) like Taekwondo until I reached the black belt level, and life just swallowed me up into the more exiting side: computers.

My favourite musicians are Joshua Aaron and Paul Wilbur, but I also love Hebraic and Japanese music as they have strong and deep cultural riches. I don’t play games on my PC now and stopped playing on consoles, but my favourite games ever are Need for Speed Carbon, and the Zelda series starting from Ocarina of Time.

What’s the situation like with LibreOffice and free software in Congo? Is it widely used, or are there challenges to adoption?

Well, I’d be modest and say we are still close to zero in terms of spreading the word everywhere in our country. The Republic of Congo is mostly influenced by almost 70% of what happens in France, with fewer real openings to proper technology, support etc. which makes things a bit more difficult.

The main challenges are having local people well-trained in FOSS and LibreOffice. The more people who get trained in a serious way and get accredited, the more FOSS and LibreOffice will spread – people here trust papers such as certificates more than everything, because they constantly think about getting employed, more than building up themselves and providing services.

There are some initiatives here touching on IT and computing, but they’re led by people leading the retail industry, and most of them think about selling what they believe will bring more money – so less about growing people, if you get my point.

I decided to start my business after five years of being jobless, because I believe this: we have to stand up if we want to build up local competences. The more we train people, the more we encourage openness, and the more meetups we arrange, the more we create exposure. (Yes, I do some other types of lucrative work in my ventures, but I don’t teach or train people to use Microsoft Office, or keep my focus on it.)

You’re part …

Many companies, non-profits, schools and other organisations around the world have switched to LibreOffice to avoid vendor lock-in and get back full control over their data. The Eyüpsultan Municipality reported from their migration to Linux and LibreOffice in recent years, which started in 2015:

This was a big decision, and it wasn’t made lightly. Open source technologies provide an important opportunity for our country to have an independent and secure information infrastructure. There are uncertainties about future terms and costs of using licensed software that connects users to a particular brand ecosystem. The more connected to these technologies we are, the harder it is to switch to alternative products. The commercial nature of key companies, to say nothing of pricing and licensing policies, poses significant risks.

As Eyüpsultan Municipality, we aimed to reduce service costs as well as external technology dependencies by using open source software, including the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Pardus was developed by the Turkish government as a desktop Linux distribution focused on graphical users in office settings. We wanted a solution that gave us an independent developer and increased sustainability, flexibility, and fiscal savings. In this respect, we consider our migration project to be a social responsibility. We are trying to create awareness of this goal by pioneering the use of Pardus in public institutions throughout Turkey.

Initial steps

The migration team knew from the start that it would be a major undertaking. They made sure to communicate with all workers in the municipality about their plans, and began by running training sessions with LibreOffice in the first phase. Then:

After the trainings, administrators installed the open source LibreOffice software to replace the licensed Microsoft Office software on all client computers. This decision to train users before installing the software minimized the problems they experienced when migrating from familiar software (including the operating system).

We didn’t stop there, though. We let people settle in with LibreOffice for a year, and in 2016, we repeated the training on Linux and LibreOffice. Once users passed an exam at the end of the training, we installed Linux on their computers. We provided re-education to those who didn’t pass the exam and then installed Linux upon success. So, the migration of the operating system began!

Even after the training, the migration team didn’t stop communicating with users – they checked in regularly to see what the workers were struggling with, and helped to fix them. In all, the team regards regular training as the most most significant reason for its success.

Introducing open source to your organisation

So, what else did they learn, and what would they say to other organisations or companies considering LibreOffice, Linux and other free and open source software?

Open source software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major savings on licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with open standards. The benefits of open source software are recognized all over the world, especially in the European …