LOUCA23 (LibreOffice Conference Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023)

Long time no see, readers!  Very sorry for my laziness.

I attended LibreOffice Conference Asia x UbuCon Asia 2023 (LOUCA23) in Surakarta, Indonesia, on October 7~8.

This was the second time LibreOffice Conference Asia has been held in Tokyo in 2019, as it could not occur due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  UbuCon Asia was first held online in 2021, and the first in-person event was held in Seoul, Korea in 2022, and this still was the second in-person event.

I was burnt out by the pandemic and had stopped most of my OSS activities, but I still had many friends in the OSS world, so I went to Indonesia to meet with them.  

Therefore, I had initially intended to be a general participant.  Still, a friend of the speaker was suddenly unable to attend due to illness, so I gave a presentation in his place.  Here is my slide:

As mentioned, I am halfway out of OSS activities, but I know what my friends are doing, so it was not so difficult to talk about this subject.

Although I cannot say that the presentation itself was a great success (due to my English language skills), I was pleased because the audience was very responsive and easy to talk to, and many people approached me after the presentation was over.

Other than my presentation, I was naturally interested in the two keynote speeches by The Document Foundation and was surprised and grateful when Franklin Weng mentioned my name as an "Asian activist to be featured at the LibreOffice Latin America Conference. "

I listened to Muhammad Syazwan Md Khusaini's "Hands-On on Translating in Ubuntu" with great interest; however, I was a bit surprised to hear from a friend that many Indonesians use English for desktop environments and applications like LibreOffice.  I recognized that this was quite different from Japan.

The event itself was just as enthusiastic. Unlike OSS events in Japan (laugh), the participants were young, and there were many women. I was also surprised to see junior high school students among the speakers.

Both lunch and dinner were complimentary, and the one-day Surakaruta city tour the day after the event was delightful.  I appreciated the hospitality of the local staff.

This was my first time in Indonesia, and although short, I enjoyed many things, including the train trip. In Yogyakarta, I visited a museum and learned a lot about the history of Indonesia. However, I was overcharged by the tuk-tuk in Yogya.

I know it was a lot of work for the organizers, but as I have many friends in LibreOffice and am also an Ubuntu user, I was very grateful that the two events were co-hosted. Thanks to all the sponsors, global/local organizers, and everyone who talked to me there.  See you soon!

LibreOffice Asia Conference 2019, Tokyo: Call for Proposal is open

...Because of the official announcement has been published, I had closed my draft article here.

If you are a Japanese speaker, please check the JP team's announcement also.

(Anyway, as above link, now we JP team has our own blog under the TDF domain.  Thank you to everyone in TDF who worked for this!)

One-day trip for COSCUP x GNOME.Asia x openSUSE.Asia 2018

Last weekend (precisely, Aug. 11th and 12th 2018), COSCUP x GNOME.Asia x openSUSE.Asia 2018, one of the largest FLOSS-related conference in Eastern Asia this year, has done with huge success, gathered many attendees not only from Asian regions but also outside of Asia.

I had only attended the Sunday the conference because of unfortunate reason, but I really had enjoyed the day!

The slide of my presentation for openSUSE.Asia track is here.

Using latest LibreOffice on openSUSE Leap 15 - by modern packaging systems from Naruhiko Ogasawara

As the title mentions, I would like to tell average Linux users to use the modern packaging system (in this context, Flatpak or AppImage) instead of using TDF rpm/deb packages with dnf, zypper or apt, if you want to follow a latest Fresh version of LibreOffice.  Some reasons it couldn't attract many people, It was a good opportunity for me to summarize these systems.
Right now I haven't switched them from distro-official one (LibO 6.0) on my Ubuntu bionic desktop yet because of my laziness, but I'll move to Snap or Flatpak, not using classical PPA build.

Shinji Enoki also from Japan had a talk to summarize LibreOffice CJK issues status and said so many thanks to Mark Hung, who is solved several CJK issues in LibO 6.1.  Of course, I also would like to say thanks to him :).
In this session, we had a little time to discuss how to encourage each language community (for us from Japan and Daehyun Sung from South Korea, or else).  Of course, it's a difficult question to answer, but we can do something together to do so I guess.  What we can do with is a good discussion point in Tirana I guess ;).

[UPDATE 2018.8.16] I forgot to mention one more thing which is important for Japanese users; Support new era (next to Heisei) of the Japanese calendar.  Mark Hung also tell us this has been already (almost) done and may need a small modification after the new era will be decided.  Here is a commit https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/58142/.  Thanks, Eike!

And we have a small booth to introduce Japanese FLOSS communities (to me, LibreOffice and Selenium users community JP) for (mainly) Asian people.

Advertisement: Selenium world conference SeleniumConf 2019 will be in Tokyo. We are preparing the site for now, and Call for proposal for sessions will be opened soon.

I only had one day (because my flight 10th evening was canceled and the extra flight departed 11th evening) but really had a great time.  Thanks, friends who I met and see you around!

LibreOffice Kaigi 2018

On May 12th, 2018, LibreOffice Japanese community had done our annual LibO event "LibreOffice Kaigi 2018" successfully, gathered around 30 people.

We had the Keynote from Mr. Tomaž Vajngerl, 6 long talks, 5 lightning talks, and Writer hands-on for end-users.

You can watch these videos on the YouTube playlist (most of these are in Japanese except the keynote and one lightning talk).  And you can find slides on our event site.

Hope I'll write a recap article of the event here near future ;)

LibreOffice mini conference 2017 Japan movies & LibreOffice Kaigi 2018

Just sharing: videos of LibreOffice mini conference 2017 Japan were published. Thanks to openSUSE.Asia 2017 Tokyo team and MNU (video sponsor)

Of course, you can find some lightning talks related to LibreOffice in the YouTube playlist. Enjoy! And Today May 12th, 2018, we, Japanese LibreOffice community have an annual LibreOffice Kaigi 2018 in Osaka (Japanese event page). Now I'm heading to the venue (this post is written in my laptop in the train ;). Hope I'll post some news from this soon.

REPORT: LibreOffice mini-conference 2017 Japan (in openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo)

On Oct 22nd, 2017, we hosted an event titled "LibreOffice mini-conference 2017 Japan," as a sub-event of "openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo."
openSUSE.Asia Summit is:

"one of the great events for openSUSE community (i.e., both contributors, and users) in Asia. Those who usually communicate online can get together from all over the world, talk face to face, and have fun. Members of the community will share their most recent knowledge, experiences, and learn FLOSS technologies surrounding openSUSE."

This year hosted this event at the University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Chofu, Tokyo, and I was honored to be a committee member.
In spite of the bad weather immediately before the hit of the huge typhoon Lan, over 150 participants from nine countries gathered in two days (Oct 21st and 22nd), and we enjoyed various talks and workshops on openSUSE and various open source software (including LibreOffice, of course) and were able to interact with each other.

Thanks to The Document Foundation for helping the travel cost, we could invite 3 speakers from cities far from Tokyo, then we had 6 speakers from 3 countries (Taiwan, Indonesia, and Japan).

Sponsor board and event board.  See "LibreOffice: The Document Foundation" logo!

Talk highlight

Let's see each talk in our mini-conference!

Opening Talk: LibreOffice: The Office Suite with Mixing Bowl Culture, by Naruhiko Ogasawara

LibreOffice: The Office Suite with Mixing Bowl Culture from Naruhiko Ogasawara

My talk :)
Introducing LibreOffice to use the keyword "Mixing bowl," taken from TDF official slide provided as a marketing material.
I love LibreOffice because everyone in the community is kind to anyone who acts to do something.  I aimed to convey a message that anyone can participate LibreOffice project in the same opportunities, and I could do (hope so).

The Interoperability of Documents, by Franklin Weng

Not only the full talk in mini-conference, but he also had a lightning talk on 21st Oct evening. by hisa_x.  Flickr link

https://speakerdeck.com/fweng322/the-interoperability-of-documents-was-a-war-of-file-format

Franklin, who leads ODF migration in Taiwan, talked about the importance of creating interoperable documents and how to do it.  "Document interoperability = Working together better" in this talk was a simple and strong, important message.

One of the keys is "document format," so we must choose ODF instead of OOXML to make interoperable documents (and of course LibreOffice is the best office suite to generate ODF ;).

I thought "interoperability" was a keyword of the mini-conference (coincidentally, many talks mentioned that).

State of CJK issues of LibreOffice, by Shinji Enoki

Shinji wearing Rome conference T-shirt. Cool! by hisa_x. Flickr link

https://speakerdeck.com/enoki/state-of-cjk-issues-of-libreoffice-libreoffice-miniconf

Shinji Enoki is a member of LibreOffice Japanese Team (Japanese NLP), same as mine.  He continuously attended LibreOffice Conference for years, and this talk was "replay" of last global conference talk in Rome.
In The Next Decade Manifesto,

WE COMMIT OURSELVES:  to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue

Then, not only UI/document translations but language-dependent features work well is also important.   But sometimes it is quite hard for developers to understand what is "work well" in language which is not his/her mother tongue.  Especially CJK, RTL for a developer who uses latin language.  So we, Asian users have to improve LibreOffice by ourselves and to help developers to go the right way.
He introduced current status of CJK issues with examples such as IVS problem, and several resources provided by the project:

• CJK Metabug
• LibreOffice CJK telegram group

Introduction to Japanese Darkness "Excel Houganshi," by Rin Nakamura

Rin Nakamura talking about Excel Houganshi. by hisa_x. Flickr link

Hmm... it is quite hard to explain what the talk means because it very tied to Japanese culture... but I'm trying.

"Houganshi (方眼紙)" means "graph paper," paper with pre-printed square grids.  In Japan, it is common to use Excel like as Houganshi, to make all cell width and height exactly same.  You can easily see so many "Excel Houganshi" via google images.
Nakamura-san claimed "You don't do this (to create "Excel Houganshi"), then introduced an example that he was bothered by such Excel Houganshi, and demonstrated the trick to make it a proper document based on it.

His message was "use tools (like office suite) with proper way."   Excel Houganshi has been a good technic in "print to paper" era, but in the digital era, it became "Japanese Darkness" culture.  No one wants to maintain Excel Houganshi document.  So, the talk was strongly related to Franklin's talk;  Excel Houganshi is exchangeable, but NOT interoperable.

Write Your Story with OpenSource, by Umul Sidikoh

Umul talking with demonstrations. by Edwin Zakaria. Flickr link

https://www.slideshare.net/Umulsidikoh/write-your-story-with-open-source

Umul from Indonesia told us how to write a document using Writer style features, with lots of demonstrations.  Live demo sometimes makes us very frustrated, but she tried well :).
This talk also related to interoperability.  Using style feature makes documents more interoperable.  It is "right way" to use Writer, instead of insert new line, white space or specify font directly, as Franklin mentioned.
I heard that this was her first overseas trip and she seemed to enjoy both the conference and Tokyo.  I believe it was a great step for her to move forward to contributing LibreOffice, and she'll continue to contribute us, with contacting other LibreOffice people.

How to build LibreOffice on your desktop, by Masataka Kondo

(Oops, I couldn't find out his photo... ><)

https://www.slideshare.net/masatakakondo16/how-to-build-libreoffice-on-your-desktop-81057881

LibreOffice is open source software.  It means, we could build LibreOffice from source code by ourselves.  Kondo-san, another member of LibreOffice Japanese Team, introduced LibreOffice building-how-to with openSUSE and Linux Mint.

Franklin commented we also could try with Docker (and he let us know the link).  I never tried to use Docker to build LibreOffice, then I would like to try near future.

Lightning Talks

openSUSE.Asia Summit has 2 lightning talk sessions in evening each of day.

In day 1 session, Franklin presented "Become a TDF Member."  It was fantastic!  Everyone was bursting laughing :).

https://speakerdeck.com/fweng322/become-a-tdf-member

In day 2 (the day of LibreOffice mini-conference) session, two interns from iCraft, the company which provides LibreOffice support in Japan and sponsored openSUSE.Asia Summit, had talks related their home country (Tunisia and Ethiopia) and LibreOffice.  They are also very interested.

TRABELSI Mohamed talking about Tunisia and LibreOffice, by hisa_x, Flickr link

Aschalew Arega Ademe talking about Ethiopian IT / FLOSS includes LibreOffice, by hisa_x, Flickr link

What is a "LibreOffice mini-conference"?  Is this different from LibreOffice Kaigi?

Anyway, I would like to explain that ;)

In my personal opinion, since LibreOffice is a consumer product, it is important that there are events where users can participate it by their mother tongue. That's why there is LibreOffice Kaigi. "Kaigi" is taken from a Japanese word "会議" means "conference," which means that it is the event for Japanese speakers by Japanese speakers. Of course, it is respect for RubyKaigi (the annual conference of the programming language Ruby), too.
Nonetheless, for the community members, of course, international exchange is also very important. We already have an annual event called LibreOffice Conference which is a wonderful opportunity to exchange information and opinions. However, the LibreOffice Conference is held in Europe (I do not want to say that is a bad thing), it is a bit difficult for Asian "neighbors" to gather. We use different mother tongues, but we live in a similar time zone, similar culture, so there should be something we can do together. Therefore, I think that it is better to have an "international, regional" conference. That is a "mini-conference."

Conclusion

I could say that our "mini-conference" this year was a huge success.  Everyone enjoyed lots of interesting talks and spent a great time to talk each other.

Thanks to all attendees, speakers, sponsors (includes The Document Foundation) and excellent volunteer staffs of openSUSE.Asia Summit.  Hope others will host another mini-conference (or any title, means "international, regional") and we will meet there!

Speakers group photo in our booth, by Edwin Zakaria. Flickr link 

Note:

I believe all videos of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 will be published soon.  I will inform you here when it's done immediately.

Call for Proposals: LibreOffice mini-conference Tokyo 2017 (as a sub-event of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017)

Dear Asian LibreOffice folks,

The Call for Proposals of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo has been opened since several days ago (I'm sorry for later notice here).

In this event, the committee will also have a sub-event named "LibreOffice mini-conference 2017 Tokyo."  This may consist several LibreOffice talks which would be grouped.

So, please consider to submit talks about LibreOffice in that CfP.  Following topics are welcome (just examples, you could add some more):

• LibreOffice core development
• LibreOffice extensions development
• Document templates creation
• Migrations to LibreOffice
• Translating of UI / Help / documents / announcements
• QA (globally or locally)

It is not mandatory that your topic(s) relate to openSUSE, but participants with openSUSE.Asia summit will be pleased if there is a relationship (and the program committee may consider that).

Please pay attention that the summit calls workshop but our mini-conference don't.  Of course, it is welcome that you will propose a LibreOffice-related workshop to openSUSE.Asia summit, it will not a part of the mini-conference, though.

openSUSE offers their own Travel Support Program and you could apply it if you'll have a long talk (or several short talks).  Please refer the URL I linked above.  And Japanese LibreOffice NLP considers supporting your travel cost by ourselves (with thanks of TDF).  Please don't hesitate to submit your talks even you live in far from Tokyo.

If you have any questions, please drop a mail to me (naruoga _at_ gmail.com).  Thanks!