Wrapping up Japanese FLOSS events since the new year

Last 2 months (Feburary and March), I had super busy dates because I've just changed my job end of the last March, and I had many job interviews and their preparing, and had to finish all jobｓ within the last month.

Anyway, I attended or organized several events related to LibreOffice Japanese community, so I'll introduce you.

Open Source Conference Hamanako 2015

Open Source Conference (shortly, OSC) is most famous event series about free software / open source in Japan (I`ve already described roughly).  OSC Hamanako 2015 was a mostly beginning of OSC 2015, at 11th Feb. 2015.

Lake Hamanako, pic from Wikipedia

Actually "Hamanako" is a lake name in Shizuoka prefecture, which is known with eel (Japanese people thought that eel is luxury food).  Around lake Hamanako, there are two major cities whose are active about open source; Hamamatsu-city and Kosai-city.

Hamamatsu-city has some open source local group; most major one is Japan Android group Hamamatsu #jaghama.  There are some major industrial companies in Hamamtsu, e.g. Yamaha group (in our area, their network equipments are so famous), so here is a nice place to promote the goodness of open source.

Kosai-city (Kosai means LAKE-WEST-side) is a quite smaller than Hamamatsu, and the important thing is the local government of Kosai-city use LibreOffice as their primary office suite.

People who love FLOSS and live around lake Hamanako host the events named "Lake Hamanako LibreOffice study party," so OSC Hamanako is one of the most important event in the Japanese LibreOffice community.

OSC Hamanako is a quite small event than another OSC (gathered around 130 people), and very friendly.  All things were in the one big hall, with 15-minutes-each talks and booths.  The LibreOffice Japanese team exhibit a booth, and had a talk.

Our booth :) (photo by Shinji Enoki, via Facebook)

Mr. Ohmori talking about the current status of LibreOffice

Open Source Conference 2015 Tokyo/Spring

Other OSC had been at 27th and 28th Feb. 2015.  As you know, Tokyo is really big city, and OSC Tokyo is the biggest one; so we have twice each year; Spring and Fall.  Around 1700 people gathered that weekend.

We had a talk how to translate LibreOffice UI/Help in 27th (the slide in Japanese is below), and also exhibit a booth.

初めての LibreOffice Localization UI / ヘルプ翻訳 from Kazumi Ohhashi

Our booth again :D (photo by Shinji Enoki, via Facebook)

Soooo many people in there! (photo by Masataka Kondo, via Facebook)

Many people know LibreOffice name, and several people use it, but some don't; still stacked OOo era...   We need more effort to promote ;).

There is an interesting question about traditional Mongolian language support.

Traditional Mongolian uses left-to-right vertical writing, similar as 90° counter-clockwise turned Arabic script.  It is a tough problem to handle traditional Mongolian well, not only in documents, but also in the user interfaces.   What's a right specification of user interfaces with left-to-right vertical righting language?

LibreOffice HackFest #3

I thought that we need to grow more LibreOffice committer in Japan, such as translators, local QA activist and developers.  To provide people opportunities to try something about LibreOffice, I host several Hacking (not only developments, but also some other LibO related tasks) events.

Taking about LibO Translation (photo by Shinji Enoki, via Facebook)

Day after OSC 2015 Tokyo/Spring, 1st March 2015, we had third LibreOffice HackFest in Tokyo.   At this time I've been so busy and I couldn't prepare development tasks, I myself mainly spent most of time to translate Document Freedom Day site.  And I told some people  very basic of LibreOffice translation work, and they tried to commit some new translations.  Good!

To keep concentrating, we need some sweet (cheese cake :)

Thanks Coworking Space Kayabacho, Co-Edo, to provide us a so nice space :).  If you have an opportunity to come to Japan and you need work with Wi-Fi and power source (and good coffee), I recommend you to ask Co-Edo.  Cool!

... I've also prepared DFD 2015 Tokyo event, but this entry is already too long, so I'll write another entry about it.

Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring (pt.2; LibreOffice)

Sorry I've no time to help LibreOffice team in last OSC Tokyo (because I've been very busy about MongoDB), then this post is a short summary of Mr. Enoki's one.


LibreOffice Japanese Team exhibited a booth 2 days in Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring, and had a talk titled "What's new in LibreOffice 4.2, with brand-new splash screen" by Mr. Ohmori.

LibreOffice Japanese team booth; with all staffs

Mr. Ohmori had a talk about what's new of LibreOffice 4.2

wearing new LibreOffice T-shirt :)

Lots of people stopped by the booth and leaflet about new features of LibreOffice 4.2 handed out almost 150.  Someone didn't know the name of LibO, but people who already use LibO seems to grow than last year.

Non-active user of LibO have interest about compatibility with Microsoft Office.  We always say,  new MSO sometimes can't read old format of MSO but LibO can, and about OOXML, we keep going to up interoperability each by each of new versions.

The agents of Shiojiri-city, Nagano-pref. stopped by the booth.  Shiojiri-city had been shift from MSO to OOo almost 2 years ago, then have moved to LibO because of development activity.  They told they have no problem with LibreOffice.  Nice :D


It's happy to hear LibreOffice users seems growing in Japan, and we want to help them in the OSC or any other opportunities.

Thanks!

Open Source Conference 2014 Tokyo/Spring (pt. 1; MongoDB JP)

Last Friday (Feb., 28th) and Saturday (Mar., 1st) was a Open Source Conference (OSC) 2014 Tokyo/Spring.


As I wrote wiki page of the Document Foundation, Open Source Conference is the most important event series in the Japanese FLOSS world.

Of course Tokyo is the biggest city in Japan, and we have OSC two time each year; Spring and Fall.  Recently OSC Tokyo had been hosted Meisei University, which is little far from center of Tokyo, but around of 2,000 FLOSS lovers gathers OSC Tokyo. Amazing!


We, MongoDB JP (MongoDB Users Group (MUG) in Japan), exhibited booth 2 days, and had a session in Saturday.  It was our first exhibit to OSC.

Friday morning.  Start quietly...

In the booth, we demonstrated a small Web program to find out nearest shops users want using geospacial index and Google Maps API.  Everyone amazed how simple query can do this.
We made leaflet to explain about very basic of MongoDB, and MongoDB JP ourselves.  According to remaining it, 158 people have it, lots of people have interest about MongoDB.  Great!

Hundreds people in the room, and many people enjoyed our demo and deep tech talk.

And Mr. Watanabe's talk gathered almost hundred people. Wow!

Yes, it was little hard 2 days (I was very tired, haha), but, all of we really enjoyed that great time.

Thanks for everyone visited our booth and attended our talk!
And our fellows, Ogawa-san, Fuzisaki-san, Fukuzaki-san, Kubota-san and Watanabe-san!  Good jop!