Update: LibreOffice mini Conference 2016 Osaka/Japan

I'm working to prepare LibreOffice mini Conference 2016 Osaka/Japan as a organization team members.  There are some updates.

• Keynote: we've invited Mr. Kohei Yoshida, well-known Calc hacker.  His talk, titled "5 years of LibreOffice," will be an interesting talk from his experience, both as a full-timed developer and as a volunteer developer.
• Talk: it was a very hard task to choice only 4 talks from many submitted talks. Finally, we will have talks about migration how-to, LibO with education, controlling LibO via API, and LibO Accessibility.
• Event site: we now published the site.  Although the site is written in Japanese, and all talks will be in Japanese also, any non-Japanese speakers are welcome.  If you want to attend, please let me know.
• We are having an event banner (thanks, Mr. Jun Nogata, who is a winner of LibO 4.4 template contest).  You can see the LibO Official event page in Japan.
• We are really appropriate to our sponsors:
• GMO Digirock Inc. is sponsoring their space
• iCRAFT JPN Corp. is sponsoring foods in night party
• JUSO Coworking is co-organizing the HackFest in 10th Jan. 2016, the next day of the miniconf.

So, yes, we will have a HackFest also.  Join us and hack LibreOffice together!

Heading to Taipei

This morning I got up very early, because I have to take a first train to go to Haneda Airport.  I'll take a flight CI223 NRT - TSA, to attend the annual openSUSE.Asia summit :)

I will have a short talk about the LibreOffice vertical writing feature (yes, same as LibreOffice Conference this year), because Taiwanese also use the feature same as Japanese.

Unfortunately, I have been super busy days, so there is no enhancement about my talk, but, I hope we will have a good discussion how to collaborate us about the development / improvement this feature.

Anyway, see you later, friends!

Now preparing the annual LibreOffice mini-Conference 2016 Osaka/Japan!

Just a quick announcement.

We, LibreOffice Japanese team, which is Japanese NLP, are preparing the annual LibreOffice mini-Conference 2016 Osaka/Japan at Jan. 9th (Sat) in Osaka, Japan.

Thanks to GMO group (Japanese major net company), the event will be held in Synergy cafe GMO Yours Osaka, 23th floor of Grand Front Osaka building.

This is Japanese NLP's event and every talks will be in Japanese, but every people worldwide is welcome.

Just a quick notice about when and where, and I'll post another article when we will begin to accept proposal for papers, open a registration page, and any other events.

See you in Osaka!

LibreOffice Conference 2015 Aarhus

First, I want to say thanks for every people who I met in Aarhus, especially the local organize team and Sophie :)

So, I've participated an annual conference of LibreOffice, in Aarhus, Denmark.  It was my first visit to the beautiful country and I really enjoyed the days.  Awesome conference it was!

My talk is about vertical writing mode in LibreOffice (mainly Writer).  Here is a slide:

Vertical Writing: typical use-cases and current status in LibreOffice from Naruhiko Ogasawara

I regret that I couldn't investigate the implementation of vertical writing features in LibreOffice much enough, and the talk is not suitable for the "technical" track, but I hope the talk let someone have interest about Japanese text writing.

my pic during the talk

While the HackFest at Thursday night just after my talk, Caolán told me that he already fixed a problem I mentioned.  Although my purpose of the talk was NOT to complain vertical writing issues to developers, it was impressive experience for me.  Cool!

My Japanese buddy, Shinji Enoki, had a talk about a migration case study, in JA Fukuoka city.  I won't tell much detail about the talk because it's not mine ;), but I thought this case study is worth to be known, and Shinji had done well.

many people participated Shinji's talk

I've love to see many of Asian people are there, and there are many kind of NLP tracks.
As I mentioned in the post about openSUSE.Asia Summit last year, we, Asian people, doesn't have a common language and we have to use English same as in global community, however, we can meet together easily in Asian conference like FOSSASIA, COSCUP, GNOME.Asia, ... than attending Europe / North American conferences, and easy to talk via chat because of less time difference.  Please keep in touch in our new IRC channel #libreoffice-nlp or else :).

It's hard to explain about many interesting talks, tasty meals, good people and exciting community.  Again thanks so much and see you all next year in Brno!

... And one more thanks to my AirBnB host, Jonus :).

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.

Japanese LibreOffice Online Activities

In the post, I want to summarize the online activities of the LibreOffice Japanese community.

On The Document Foundation infrastructure

We, LibreOffice Japanese Team (Japanese Native Language Project), currently focus on the activities.  Having an information / communication hub is very important to energize our community we believe, and TDF infra is the best place to do that.

Mainly we maintained:

• announce@ja.libreoffice.org list - "every" announce in announce@d.o has been translated on time.  Great work, Abe-san!
• discuss@ja.libreoffice.org list - talking about Japanese LibreOffice community, preparing events, or some translation works.
• users@ja.libreoffice.org list - list for Japanse LibreOffice users.
• Askbot - launched since last August.  Quite a good Q&A site.
• wiki.d.o/JA - Wiki for Japanese regional information.
• (of course we have translated some wiki.d.o materials to Japanese)

Social Networks

Nowadays, SNSes, like Twitter, Facebook and Google+, are very important communication tool in our everyday life.  We maintained several our "official" accounts in Japanese language:

• @LibreOffice_Ja (Twitter) - LibreOffice Japanese Team account.  Some announcements such as release, Japanese events.
• @LibreOfficeJa (Twitter) - news feed of LibreOffice Japanese content, from users@ja.l.o list or else
• LibreOffice(Japanese) (Facebook):  LibreOffice Japanese Team page, provides information from global blog, announcements, or introducing events in Japan.
• LibreOffice meetups (Facebook): a page for the people have an interest to involve LibreOffice meetup / study party in Japan.  Now I have a plan to switch this from FB page to FB group
• LibreOffice Hamanako Study Party (Facebook)

I don't know why we haven't Google+ account...  It's better to have this, I suppose.

Blogs, ...

There are several good LibreOffice materials in Japanese.  Some of this can see in TDF planet (includes my blog).

The oooug, which is the Japanese very historic FLOSS office suite (mainly LibreOffice, former OpenOfice.org), has the site with very nice materials, and their own SNS.  But unfortunately, they seem less active now...

Some end users publish their own LibreOffice materials, such as:

• Aizu-Wakamatsu city: Introduction of OSS office soft and ODF, Their LibreOffice History, LibO from OOo migration case study
• Tokushima Prefecture: LibreOffice operating manual
• JA Fukuoka-city: So many materials includes Excel to Calc migration guide, Migration strategy from MS Office to LibreOffice.

I might miss some, however, done is better than perfect ;).  Please tell me if you have any additional info.  Thanks!