Click here to go to the LibreOffice Challenge site and Donate!

You may be wondering why I don’t post very often.

Well, apart from the fact that I have a lot of professional work to do, I’ve been involved in the LibreOffice project over the past months, and it’s been taking up quite a bit of my available time.

Originally, I was interested in doing work for the documentation project, but I ended up putting in a great deal of time developing content for the LibreOffice.org website.

Now I’m putting in more time for the documentation project, especially focused on organization and infrastructure.

Previously, the documentation team hadn’t really yet formed since the LibreOffice fork away from the Oracle-run OpenOffice.org project.

There weren’t many contributors, and there was no formal workflow for documentation production.

We’ve been working on that, and I’ve set up an Alfresco content management system, and collaboration platform at alfresco.libreoffice.org, which we are now using for working on a documentation base of user guides and manuals covering all the applications of the LibreOffice personal productivity suite.

Alfresco is a very powerful and sophisticated package, but it takes quite a lot of configuration to make it into exactly the tool you need for the work to be done.

So that’s what I’ve been busy with.

Now, The Document Foundation has taken another step forward in its development.

The Steering Committee has launched an appeal for funds to set up a not-for-profit organization – A German “Stiftung” – to give the project a proper legal standing.

The project needs to collect 50,000 euros for this, and has launched a challenge.

Progress so far has been really encouraging. Although there were some who weren’t optimistic about the chances of success, the challenge has only been running a few days and – at the time of writing this post – had already collected two thirds of the needed amount.

A special information website was put together at http://challenge.documentfoundation.org/. Head on over there and don’t be shy to contribute a little money!