Comments on LibreOffice Sites and Community
Hello,
Is there, somewhere, a profile of the Document Foundation community online? The “LibreOffice community”? The “Community Map” has no weights or sizes.
I looked at the people and groups that you follow, and a bit of who they follow and are linked to. https://twitter.com/tdforg I attached my notes. The totals are not indicative of the community size, since these groups are closely related.
I wanted to look at the source code, because I can tell a lot about any project by how they organize (or do not) their files and information. I went to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/pre-releases/ and tried git clone https://git.libreoffice.org/core through the GitHub.com Git client. It is taking many hours.
I looked at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org/#!/progornoprog/design and it is really terrible. Just list the needs, it is NOT an interactive guessing game. If you have needs, list them all and let people glance at it, then decide where they want more information.
Your financial reports are rather terse, and — if you are truly for “open” software and sharing — NEVER use PDF. It is a closed proprietary format, anything put into it is hard to impossible to use. You are the LibraOffice Foundation — why are you not putting your financial reports in Open spreadsheets? Why are you not putting your reports and progress and information in your own open formats?? Shame on you. PDF is the reason “covid” and “global climate change” and tens of thousands of other global projects are at a snails pace. You should be helping to share equations as equations, tables and databases as data in forms that anyone can use immediately. You should NOT put putting them into paper equivalents – where a human reader has to eyeball it, resolve the missing pieces, and then recreate the original tools and data.
The “Please ask your questions via our portal Ask.LibreOffice.Org” is hard to see. You could go directly there from pages at https://www.libreoffice.org/ without going through Twitter. The colors are hard to read and you have no way for users to change the layout. You use way too much screen length — single spaced tables would be faster and easier to browse or find things. You are not organizing and curating the answers, nor profiling the community.
I took over TheInternetFoundation.Org from Network Solutions in July 1998 (23rd Anniversary this month). The original Foundation was cancelled because Al Gore diverted the money from the annual fees per domain to put Internet into neighborhood in the US. The US Attorney General ruled that illegal, and rather than fix it, they just cancelled the whole thing.
Richard Collins, Director, The Internet Foundation
