mksaunders

The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) | Development Mentor | Remote | Part/Full-time

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world’s leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. We are truly passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community, especially as we are about to enter the second decade of our project.

To grow the LibreOffice community and to enlarge the associated ecosystem, together working on office productivity for over 200 million users around the globe , we’re searching for a Development Mentor (m/f/d) to start work as soon as possible.

As our future development mentor, you work with a great team of currently eleven to attract new contributors by promoting the LibreOffice project. You'll also identify and onboard them, by building relationships between new coders and the community.

Full details: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2021/01/18/join-the...

Commodore 64, sure, but I wouldn't recommend the Atari 2600 for beginners! I wrote a small game for the 2600 years ago, and it's a tricky little machine. It doesn't even have a video frame buffer, so you have to do things on the fly, depending on which line of the screen is being beamed (think of old-school CRTs).

Indeed, a whole book was written about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam

The 2600 is fascinating and fun to code for, but for asm newbies I'd recommend the C64 or NES...

The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) | Administrative Assistant | Remote only | Part to full-time | German and English required

The Document Foundation is the home of the LibreOffice community and one of the most popular open source projects, with an estimated user base of 200 million people worldwide.

The foundation has existed for seven years and today several activities are coordinated by a multi-national team of open source advocates who look after release management, infrastructure, marketing, quality assurance, mentoring, documentation, user experience and design.

We are now looking for an Administrative Assistant. The position requires speaking both German and English (which is and remains the project’s main language) and this is the reason why the tender is in German. Find it here:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/03/01/tdf-tend...

Development Mentor (C++) | The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) | Anywhere / home office | Part/full time

The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, the most popular open source office suite. We are looking for a Development Mentor to:

- Build relationships between existing mentors and new contributors - Identify and on-board new contributors - Affirm and encourage their contributions

and more. If you know C++ and have experience in open source projects, get in touch!

Full details: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/02/02/join-our...

Thanks for your understanding and fair discussion :-) On this point:

> This collecting user data to influence their behavior...

I think that's a really negative and cynical way to look at what we and other FOSS projects are doing. Here's an example of what we can do with some basic website analytics data: we can put a banner on the download page saying "Made by the community - you can be a part too!". The banner links to a "Get involved" page, encouraging people to join the project.

Then, with analytics tools, we can see how well that works. We can do A/B testing by having some download pages with the banner, some without, and see which ones help bring new people into our FOSS community. This is really useful and good for us all!

Now you could say this is about "influencing behavior", and in a super pedantic sense it is. But again, when people talk about websites "influencing behavior" the big topics at the moment are Russian troll farms, Cambridge Analytica etc. I don't think it's fair to use terms like that when we're not trying to play mind games with anyone!

> That slippery slope has Facebook-like mind manipulation at the end of it

Ah please, we're just a small non-profit entity organising a FOSS project and trying to make a website that encourages people to get involved. The "slipperly slope" argument doesn't work well. One thing doesn't inherently lead to another. With that argument, drinking beer leads to other substances which leads to X Y Z... Nah, I've been drinking beer for years and haven't touched anything else. Beer is great enough :-)

Really, if you have a genuine fear that some LibreOffice community members using Piwik to improve the site could lead to "Facebook-like mind manipulation at the end", please do join the website list, put forward your points and let's deal with it! But having been involved in FOSS projects for over 20 years, I don't think that's a concern. People are just trying to do the right thing :-)

> tracking is tracking

But as another commenter here mentioned, simplifications like that do far more damage than good. In the broader world, "tracking" on the internet generally refers to companies following you all over the web and selling your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you lump TDF's use of Piwik (for our site, for our own use, with obfuscated data in storage and a clear privacy policy) with that of advertising providers, who really do track you all over the web, don't tell you what they store, and sell your data. By saying "tracking is tracking", you tar everyone in the same brush. That's lacking nuance and really, really unfair to volunteer-driven FOSS projects (many of which use Piwik) that are just trying to do their best.

> You should not care how much time users spend on your site, etc.

Well, that's your opinion! But many of us in the LibreOffice community see the website as a major part of the product (and project). Do we want to spread the word about FOSS? Compete effectively with MS Office? Build our community and attract new contributors? Encourage donations so that we can support the community? Then we need a well-structured and useful website. Analytics tools help a lot in that.

> In fact, your web site can be pretty basic for downloading new software.

Again, that's the way you see it, fair enough. But actually the site needs to do a lot more than that. It needs to encourage people to try the software (screenshots, videos etc.) It needs to provide help, and support options, and front-ends to mailing lists. It needs to provide infrastructure for the project and community as a whole. The more we can optimise that - with the help of some analytics tools - the stronger we can make LibreOffice and the community. That's very important to us; if you disagree, join the LibreOffice project website list and put forward your case :-)

> You're are assuming that not using tracking will automatically result in a bad website.

But that's not what I said at all. Please don't just thrown in things like that. I said that analytics tools can be really useful in many ways to help to improve a website (especially a bad one).

You ask "why", well look here at the features that the open source tool we use provides: https://matomo.org/features/

I'm not sure if you've worked in website design before but many of those features are very important and effective for improving a website. If we want to spread the word about FOSS, and encourage more people to use it, shouldn't we try to make the best website we can? While also informing users about the open source tools we use, and having a clear privacy policy about them?

https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/privacy/privacy-policy-...

Thanks for the feedback! I'll pass it on to the website team :-)

Look at it this way:

* If we had a bad website, people would complain that it's ineffective, and not helping drive people towards FOSS

* If we then add open source analytics tools to try to improve the site, people ask why we are "tracking" them

* If we then add a banner, people complain that we're training people to ignore banners

...so it's hard to get anything right, it seems! We could remove Piwik completely (although it's not my call - I'm just one person in the project). But then it'd be much harder to improve our website. Piwik is really useful and if we want FOSS to be more widespread and adopted, we shouldn't shy away from such tools, IMO.

Feel free to join the Design community and give us a hand - only with more input from volunteers will things get better! https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design

I was referring to the fact that he "hated" the icons - it's not the end of the world, as you can use the old ones. But you're right, I've added the three steps to my original post!

Then simply use the older icons :-)

EDIT: Three steps:

1. Go to Tools > Options in the menu 2. Click View on the left 3. Then choose Icon style on the right

> 1. What you've described as 'not "tracking" ' is tracking. It's not third-party tracking but you're still deliberately adding a cookie for the purpose of tracking users across your site.

OK, we're using open source tools to try to improve the site. Plenty of other FOSS projects do this... Not sure why we're being singled out :-)

I use it on Linux and macOS and it's pretty fast with CSV files (although I'm not sure how large the ones you're using are!)

If it's specific CSV files that are causing an issue, and you don't mind sharing them, you could attach them to a bug report: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org

Also try resetting your profile in case that's an issue: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/UserProfile#Resolving_co...

> Why does the Document Foundation need to track me?

It's not "tracking" (in the sense of monitoring what you do on other sites). On the LibreOffice website, we use the open source stats tool Matomo (formerly Piwik) to get an overview of how people use the site, how people go from one page to another, so that we can improve it. Lots of FOSS projects do this. Also, as explained in the privacy policy, JavaScript is required if you want to use certain third-party services that are embedded into some pages: https://www.libreoffice.org/about-us/privacy/privacy-policy-...

> Is LibreOffice itself doing something sneaky that I don't know about?

Of course not. We're a volunteer-driven, community open source project. It's all in the open :-) If you really want to change how the website works, we'd appreciate a hand: [email protected] - thanks!

There's a short video showing the theme, and other features mentioned, as linked in the blog post ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvoCpnwGNFU

Those are two different Gtk themes...

> Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use.

It's possible to do both! Not everyone in a large open source project works on the same thing. In the FOSS world, people choose what's important for them, so it's hard to say "they should" and make everyone do one specific thing.

But anyway, LibreOffice does have a design community with weekly meetings, blueprints and other activities:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design

They are working on the "Notebookbar" alternative GUI design, so if you're not happy with the design, why not join them and help out? :-)

Why not research it for yourself? Here's a start:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr...

Look at the "Major Feature Differences" and "Minor Feature Differences" sections.

This is why it's still an exerimental feature, and the more testing and feedback the design community gets, the better!

The Document Foundation | Development Mentor | Remote, part or full time

The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks an individual – or individuals part (or full) time – to be a Development Mentor to start work as soon as possible. The role requires the following:

* Self-starting, remote working experience

* Experience contributing to FLOSS communities

* Excellent communication skills, with enthusiasm for mentoring

* Coding experience (LibreOffice coding preferred)

* Willingness to travel to Hackfests & conferences in Europe and globally

The role involves working from home at your location for at least 20 hours per week, up to full-time. For more information on the role, see:

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2017/11/07/job-sear...

Deadline for applications: December 5, 2017