A report on LibreOffice India Community Ideation Meet-Up
Date of the meet: 16-MAY-2014
Time:
03.00 P.M.-05.00 P.M. IST.
Venue: Red
Hat Office, Tower 10, Magarpatta City, Pune, India.
irc@freenode:
libreoffice
event
hashtag: #libreofficeindia
Background
LibreOffice is one of the flagship products of a movement called
'FOSS'. It is one of the best office application suite which is
available free of cost for most of the platforms and in many languages
across the world. The application is useful for everyone from a
student to a researcher and across various domains. Rajesh Ranjan and
Chandrakant Dhutadmal were in a discussion for quite some time about
the promotion and proliferation of this beautiful product and were not
quite sure about the reach of this product in India. Hence, we had
started a thread on marketing list of LibreOffice. After discussions
with Charles-H. Schulz and Prof. Kannan from IIT Mumbai, we thought of
having an Ideation meet up in India to discuss the current state of
penetration of LibreOffice in India and how to increase the reach with
the help of the Community.
Agenda of the meetup
1. Get to know each other
2. Introduction about LibreOffice marketing movement in India
3. Raise brand awareness on LibreOffice in India
4. How to attract volunteers to contribute to LibreOffice
5. Plan of Action
1. Get to know each other
Initially we thought the response to this event would be poor as it
was planned on a short notice and also with small budget, but there
were around 14 people face-to-face and one online who participated in
the event. Thanks to Red Hat for hosting this event. We all got to
know each other as well as the areas of interest where the
participants could contribute. The members were from literally all
aspects of LibreOffice community Viz. Development, Localization,
Marketing, Testing and Documentation. Hence we can expect good
contribution from these members in future. Participants of the events
: Rajesh Ranjan, Chandrakant Dhutadmal, Keral Patel Anish Patil,
Krishna Babu, Ankit Patel, Shankar Prasad, Shantha Kumar, Saibal,
Shubhra Joshi, Sangeeta Kumari, Vishakha Dhutadmal, Ani Peter, and
Manoj Giri. We discussed the agenda and background of the event
through one small presetation [1].
2. Introduction about LibreOffice marketing movement in India
By the time we met for the discussion, we knew that though LibreOffice
is being used by many in India, the penetration level is too low.
There are efforts done by individual organizations like C-DAC [2],
RedHat [3] and IIT Mumbai [4] on individual basis, but there is no
collaborative effort in this direction. C-DAC has been involved in
training (face-to-face) various Govt. offices and educational
institutions on how to use LibreOffice since quite some time now.
Prof. Kannan and his team has also put good efforts in terms of
creating large number of self-instructional audio video tutorials on
LibreOffice, in English (about 60), and with audio dubbed into many
Indian languages (a total of about 500) [5], SELF workshops on
LibreOffice and to a lesser extent on Linux, Tamil Nadu Govt switching
over to BOSS[6] and some more offices are switching to Fedora and
other distributions which is good for LibreOffice. Prof. Kannan’s team
is also trying to come up
with print edition of LibreOffice Manuals (500 copies) to promote
LibreOffice in colleges, who need a "printed book" for the software to
be included in their curriculum.
Having localized version of LibreOffice is important from promotion
point of view. Currently, there are as many as 16 Indian languages
where Localization teams exist[7]. Chandrakant Dhutadmal has already
requested to create new teams for all those Indian languages that are
currently not present.
3. Raise brand awareness on LibreOffice in India
Discussion amongst the members present on how to raise the brand
awareness in India took place. Following are the point in nutshell
which participants thought would be helpful.
*Introduction of Swags, T-Shirt, Sticker, Badges is very important.
*Conduct demo sessions in various colleges/ schools.
*Conduct LibreOffice development oriented Workshops.
*Using the social media extensively.
*Contacting SMEs/ Start-ups/ System Administrators
*Try to add LibreOffice in school/college curriculum
*Conducting various small events across the country.
*Help community members in participating in International events to
interact with other contributors and learn more from them to replicate
the model in India.
*Create Success stories and highlight them
*Organizations like C-DAC are already using LibreOffice. Can we target
more such large organizations
*All FOSS based OS and related orgs use LibreOffice. We can also
target other OS’s popular in market.
*Shipment of Physical CDs is necessary as downloading of softwares
becomes difficult in India because of various problems which
individuals face
*Support related to installations and other technical aspects needs to
be provided to the end users. So, can we create virtual support
groups.
*Pre-installation of LibreOffice on Laptops and Computer systems could
also boost the penetration of LibreOffice.
4. How to attract volunteers to contribute to LibreOffice
*Start “LibreOffice Ambassador” type of Program
*Workshops/events/BOF/Webinars
*Screen casting of applications use and how to contribute for
libreoffice.
*Language specific events can be done for localization. C-DAC is
already willing to contribute translation for languages - already
mails are there on list.
*Software Testing and Quality Management is important – Projects and
Groups like FUEL Project [8], FLTG[9], SSCG[10] can help in this
regards.
*More Dictionaries can be integrated in LibreOffice.
*India Specific artworks can be created.
5. Plan of Action
This is just to start. We need to discuss more on plan of action.
These are just few task we are going to do in another 1-2 months:
*Create success story in an educational institution: Chandrakant
Dhutadmal volunteered to conduct one event in educational institute
within a period of one month. Currently schools are having vacations.
*Conduct “Bhasha Computer Mela”- Shubhra Joshi and Sangeeta Kumari
volunteered to coordinate and arrange the event in a school.
Pix of the events can be browsed here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ksangeeta/sets/72157644715122521
Thank you all for attending and supporting the event!
1. http://slides.com/rajeshkajha/libreoffice-india
2. http://www.cdac.in/gist
3. http://www.redhat.com
4. www.iitb.ac.in
5.
http://www.spoken-tutorial.org/list_videos?view=1&foss=LibreOffice-Suite-Writer&language=all
6. http://bosslinux.in/
7. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Language_Teams
8. http://fuelproject.org
9. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FLTG
10. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SSCG
Regards,
Chandrakant Dhutadmal and Rajesh Ranjan
Pune, India.
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