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!

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.

openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo will be welcoming LibreOffice people also ;)

The photo above is taken by @ftake, openSUSE.Asia Summit Tokyo project manager

Dear Asian LibreOffice folks,

Finally, the official announcement of openSUSE.Asia Summit 2017 Tokyo has been published! It will take place at the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan on October 21 and 22.

I think it is wonderful that openSUSE people have their own annual event in Asia, and I proud to have an opportunity to help them.

LibreOffice is a quite different from linux distro like openSUSE because it is a consumer product; most users aren't tech people nor computer geeks and they use it with their own languages only (yes, it is one of LibreOffice projects' goal to use it with our mother tongue), however, I believe that we, Asian LibreOffice people, might have something to collaborate even we use different languages.

So, please mark October 21 and 22 on your calendar to come, and prepare to submit nice LibreOffice talks. CfP will be published soon, then I will share here.

See you in Tokyo!

NOTE: Just a copy & paste article from Facebook post.  Sorry!

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 :).

GNOME.Asia Summit & FUDCON APAC 2014

I hope someone still watching the blog... :)

I've been Beijin from 23rd to 26th May to attend GNOME.Asia summit & FUDCON APAC 2014 in 24th and 25th.  Actually, I'm not a GNOME guy, but I use Ubuntu (Unity) and Ubuntu uses lots of GNOME components, and this is the biggest FLOSS-desktop related event in the Asia region, that's why I had wanted to join in as a LibreOffice guy.

Anyway, the event had been in the conference hall of Beihang University.  Really a good venue.

Here is a new center building of Beihang Univ.

The conference center is in there.

Really huge building!

I was so stupid to misunderstand the program and I lost some talks in the morning of the first day.  And there was a LibreOffice talk...  But fortunately, someone introduced the speaker Mr. Yifan Jiang and we had been able to discuss how to collaborate Asian LibreOffice communities.

Photo with Yifan (right side. Left side is me)

He had been in SUSE booth and SUSE guys are now preparing to have a openSUSE Asia Summit 2014 in October, so I hope I'll meet him in the summit :).

Other interesting talks we had.  I don't have enough time and English skill to describe all of them, but short summary is:

• RMS's keynote was really impressed, although I know most of his propositions in FSF's site.  Even if his opinion is so radical (for example, anyone should not write proprietary code to get money), I seemed he was very casual one with enough witness.
• New input method talk by Daiki Ueno and Anish Patil.  IM is the very important DE component for Japanese (and maybe for Chinese) to use DE.
• Great talk about Ansible and Docker.
• I had a good opportunity to inspect inside of the GNOME Foundation in the session "Ramblings from the governing body of the GNOME Foundation."  GNOME Foundation is the elder foundation than The Document Foundation and the governance seems so sophisticated (for example, rules about travel fees in each event such as GNOME. Asia itself).  I think we can learn something from us.

I want to add a thing that lots of people want to have GNOME.Asia in Japan!  Yeah!

But right now I feel it's little hard job for GNOME people in Japan and I can't say "you should do because most of global people wanted" or something.

Anyway, yes, like as a this year's GNOME.Asia (done with FUDCON APAC), works some other communities (of course LibreOffice should be included) together is a good idea.

And dream of myself is to have a LibreOffice Asia conference in the future.  We can share the same goal.  Don't we?

Anyway, I really enjoyed the event, to hear nice talk, to communicate very interesting / fun persons.

And my dream which we'll have a Asian conference of LibreOffice is bigger and bigger.

Thanks all of you who I met :)