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!

Short trip in Taipei

I spent some day in Taipei now.  It is last night (sadly) of my Taipei trip so I would like to remain some note my Taipei days here.

TL; DR: I love this trip in Taipei.  I promise that I'll visit here again soon.

Sunday: COSCUP

After I've exhibit Open Source Conference 2017 Kyoto on last Friday and Saturday (actually it had been another trip because I live in Tokyo), I had moved to Taipei to participate COSCUP, which is the well-known event as most biggest FLOSS event in Taiwan and I wanted to participate for years.

I could join COSCUP thanks for Mr. Franklin Weng and Mr. ZerngChia.  Then I noticed that there are so many young people and women.  I have been jealous because many Japanese FLOSS events except dev-focused (I mean PyCon JP, RubyKaigi, DroidKaigi) has less young / women participants.  I would like 'steal' the secret how to attract young people :D from COSCUP organizers.

I enjoyed some talks (about Rust, openSUSE, and desktops), although I couldn't completely understand Chinese.  Most interested talk to me was about TALOS project.  I think that saving a language from extinction is one of the most meaningful usages of FLOSS, and it relates the next decade manifesto of The Document Foundation.

Of course, I talked several people who already I met, or new to me.  It was an awesome time.

Monday: sightseeing and community meeting

It was quite a tough day Today, with around 20,000 steps walk (more than 6 times of my usual day), and having 2-hours community meeting without dinner (yes, it's my fault I forgot to bring something to eat).

However, I really enjoyed the whole of Today.

Sightseeing Taipei

It was my first sightseeing in Taipei city (mentioned yesterday on Facebook).  I have walked around Presidential Office Building of R.O.C and Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.  I love these beautiful structures.  And history about Chiang Kai-shek is interesting to me as a Japanese.

I also enjoyed a lunch and bubble tea in the Taipei 101 food court, the view of Taipei city from the observatory, and the north gate.  Everything beautiful.

Meeting with Mr. Italo Vignoli and Taiwan LibreOffice people

In the evening, I've joined the meeting with Taiwan LibreOffice people and their awesome guest Italo Vignoli.

Although I couldn't add some valuable comment as a Japanese community member (because lacking both of my experience of migration to LibO and my English skill ;), the time I spent is quite good to me to consider about Japanese NLP's future work deeply.

To be honest, I'm not a political guy as usual Japanese people, but I guess I should do some more "political" things if I love openness like ODF and LibreOffice.

Thanks to Italo for his interesting talk, and Franklin for organizing that night event.  And also many people gathering the evening.

After that, I had the honor to have a dinner with Mark Hung, most active committer to LibreOffice in CJK area.  Thanks to Mark, I had spent a good time to discuss LibO CJK development or else.  It is pity that time was quite limited so we JP and TW communities need to have another opportunity to discuss that :).

I am sorry that I can not express how much I am thankful to all of you who I met while the trip, because of lacking my English skill.  Just say; Thank you so much, I love you!

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!

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12 Videos

Time is passing too fast.  And I'm sorry not to mention here that LibreOffice Japanese community had published presentation videos at LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12.

You can enjoy Mr. Franklin Weng's awesome keynote "LibreOffice/ODF Migration in Taiwan."

Any other videos in the Kaigi have been published at "LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12" playlist at YouTube.  This list is provided by LibreOffice Japanese Team (LibreOffice Japanese NLP) official channel.  The channel also provides videos at another event "LibreOffice mini Conference 2016 Osaka/Japan."

Every talks except the keynote has been in Japanese (because Kaigi is a "Japanese-local" event), but I hope you all enjoy the videos.

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12 had finished successfully! (quick update)

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12, Japanese annual LibreOffice conference, had finished yesterday with great success!

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12 group photo

The word "Kaigi" is a Japanese word "会議," means "conference."  The name means not only Japanese "regional," but also "Japanese users specific."

Around 25 people gathered, and enjoyed several talks (ODF migration, LibreOffice/ODF and styles, maintaing Math and Japanese translation), Lightning talks and a panel discussion.

At the same venue, Japanese Debian guys run their own mini Debian conference, and we had a party together!

Both of Debian and LibreOffice folks enjoyed party

I promise I will write a report in detail near future, but in this article, I want to let you know we totally enjoyed the Kaigi and everyone feels happy.

Thank you for all speakers (especially Mr. Franklin Weng as the keynote speaker), attendees and staffs.  And many thanks to our wonderful sponsors:

- Cybozu Inc. (venue)

- i-Craft Corp. (party)

LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12

Short notice,

We, Japanese LibreOffice community, are preparing the"LibreOffice Kaigi 2016.12" on 10th Dec. (Sat), the annual LibreOffice meetup in Japan.

• Date/Time: 10th Dec. (Sat), 13:00-18:00 JST
• Venue: Cybozu Inc. (Tokyo Nihonbashi Tower 27F, Nihonbashi, Tokyo)
• Fee: free (NOT includes the party at the same night)

The name of the event was renewed, from "LibreOffice mini Conference Japan", to emphasize it is not only "geographically local" but "language local."  "Kaigi" is a Japanese word means "conference" or "meeting."

We will invite Mr. Franklin Weng, who leads Taiwan government's ODF / LibreOffice migration, as the keynote speaker.   We believe that his talk will be a perfect gift for Japanese LibreOffice users.

The whole programs will be in Japanese (except the keynote; we will prepare the Japanese slide though), but of course, every non-Japanese speakers are welcome.

We'll co-organize the party after the conference with Debian Japanese community; they'll also have a conference exact a same venue :).  And we'll have a HackFest on 11th Dec. (Sun) at the same venue.

See you at Nihonbashi!

LibreOffice Conference 2016 Brno (or my hospital life in Czech)

Time is passing too fast.  Almost one month ago, LibreOffice community had an annual conference in Brno, Czech

Entrance. Welcome to LibreOffice Conference 2016 Brno!

Beautiful venue

Unfortunately, I had fever quite and strong pain in my left leg ("erysipel" according to my medical certificate) while the date, and I had stayed the hospital while the conference...

I had been the University Hospital Brno from 7th to 10th Oct.

The gate of hospital.  Thanks for everyone!

I'm so sorry you all LibreOffice friends worrying about me.  Now I'm (almost) fine.  My left leg is still swollen little bit, but no pain.  I live my life as usual :)

It was little sad that I missed most of interesting talks in the conference, I had to absent most of interesting events within the dates.  However, it was good opportunity to me that I could observe our community from different aspect.

I proud that I'm a part of the brilliant community.  All of you are awesome!  I can't express well with my English how I appreciate you.  Thanks to Czech local team, especially Tomas and Jiri, my doctor doctor and nurses did anything perfectly to cure me, although I couldn't understand any Czech language and my English is not fluent.

See you in Rome!

(And personally, I have to try Czech beer near future :)

Brno Central Station

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!

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.

Joint meeting of Kanto LibreOffice HackFest & DocFest Tokyo/Fall 2014

Last Saturday, 21st November, we, the LibreOffice Tokyo community, held the second HackFest in Hon-Komagome, Tokyo.  Main target is joining Bug Hunting Session.  As wiki says, we had mainly followed the MozTrap manual test,

This event was a joint event with FLOSS translators' meeting, called DocFest.  My Friend, who arrange the venue, Kentaro Hatori is leading Japanese translation of GNU Health passionately.  And some people from different projects has worked together, and talk about their own projects.

Working so hard

So we need coffee and some sweets :D

We have several kinds of participates:

• 4 LibreOffice offline, and 1 online (via IRC) bug hunters
• 1 LibreOffice Impress Remote translator
• 3 GNU Health translators
• 1 Debian JP member
• 1 Fedora / GNOME translator

And what we've done are:

• Filed bugs: fdo #86552, #86553, #86557
• Bug confirmation: fdo #86390
• Developing new LibreOffice extension
• Impress Remote translation preparation

Fortunately, following day (Sunday, 22nd, November) Fukuoka LibreOffice community held another meeting, and they had a Bug Hunting time slot (great!), so we still have several problems need to investigate:

• In Draw, sometimes characters disappear some characters with huge Japanese fonts.

• Base hang up when the "Use Wizard to Create Report..." launched on Windows
  (can't reproduce in Ubuntu)
• Base hang up when the "Create Report in Design View..." launched on Windows
  (can't reproduce in Ubuntu)
• In Calc, password lock feature of macro libraries doesn't work well (seems locked, but after save and reopen, it unlocked)
• (Old bugs till 4.3)  In Calc, when a library is password locked, Japanese strings in the library is broken.

Now we're investigating these issues, and some of these will be filed to fdo.

And thanks to Christian Lohmaier, we had a VM that has a bibisect repo and whole source code.  It helped us pretty well.

Thanks, everyone!  We did well, but still some effort will needed.  Keep going!

This day was "Ni-no-tori," special day in Japan

And there was a festival nearby the venue.  Good!

Preparing next LibreOffice Hackfest, as an offline Bug-hunting session

Short notice :)

We, the Tokyo LibreOffice community now preparing to have the LibreOffice Hackfest on this Saturday (22th, November).   That day is within the LibreOffice Bug Hunting Session, the global event aimed to do as much testing on the 4.4.0 as possible, so our main target is bug-hunting.

Of course we can collaborate IRC channel #libreoffice-qa globally, but chatting in English is a little tough work for some of the Japanese people (includes me :), that's why I want to have an offline bug-hunting, to provide opportunity for discussion in our mother tongue, Japanese.

HackFest in Tokyo is one of Japanese offline bug-hunting events, other people in LibreOffice Japanese Team prepare

I (freenode nick: naruoga) will be online in #libreoffice-qa channel from 1am to 11am UTC on 22th, November.  Because of the time difference, it's not a core mentoring slot, but I hope we'll see you LibreOffice QA people.

Kanto LibreOffice Hackfest & Tokyo-area Debian meeting

This is an later report also, sorry.

The Debian community in Japan is very active.  Debian JP (Japanese) is a Japanese organization to promote Debian in Japan, since 1998 (!).  There are several Debian developers / maintainers,  and they have monthly study parties in Tokyo-area, and Kansai-area.

We, the LibreOffice Tokyo community is much younger than Debian's one (just two years old), but we also have monthly Meetup.


Anyway, as the Debian global project does, Debian JP wants to collaborate on upstream projects like LibreOffice, so we held joint Meetup in 25th October (Thanks Hideki Yamane to offer to do together, and Takahide Nojima to arrange the Meetup), in SQUARE-ENIX's beautiful seminar room.  This is 119th (!) meeting of Tokyo Debian, and our third LibreOffice Hackfest.

Group photo by Hideki.  Thanks!

Hideki already wrote a nice article to report the good Meetup, so I add a little.

Understanding LibreOffice packaging in Debian is so nice for me as an Ubuntu user.  We learned Debian package of LibreOffice has many patches, and had discussed to apply these patches to upstream.

As our Hackfest, I tried my first Easy Hack, since the HackNight of the last LibreOffice conference, Bern (wow, 2 months needed).  I couldn't commit a patch at that time, but after a few days later, I finally sent a patch and accepted.  It was my first commit to LibreOffice.  Yeah!

Others tried to fix a libvisio bug, to translate UI in Pootle, to create a document how to report a problem for Japanese casual users, ...  Pretty nice Hackfest we did :)