As Christoph Noack opened a time capsule, let me do the same. Mine goes back 2 months to Sept 17/18/19 when specially invited members of the German-language OpenOffice.org community came to Hamburg. The visitors pictured above, plus me and Marcus Lange from Sun who joined the photo, were (l to r): Marcus Lange, Florian Effenberger, Daniel Stoni, Christian Lohmaier, Elizabeth Matthis (aka Liz), Thomas Hackert Uwe Altmann (not pictured: Gerald Geib, Volker Merschmann)

It was so wonderful to meet face to face people otherwise only known from email and to be able to thank them for their dedication and support. They each traveled here at their own cost (from far corners of Germany and even from Switzerland), which further shows their enthusiasm and dedication to our thriving open source product. On Thursday evening, those who were already in Hamburg met at a pub (Max&Consorten) for a first get-together. Afterward, most of us concluded the evening with a round of beers and more talk at my home---which I jokingly called "Motel Matthis".

Friday started out with a heartfelt word of welcome and thanks from Michael Bemmer, Senior Director of StarOffice/OpenOffice.org Engineering, and unfolded with a series of talks and snacks, including lunch and several smaller group meetings about special topics, until concluding at approximately 5:30 PM.

There were entertaining and informative talks by Stefan Taxhet on OOo in general, Gerd Weiss on infrastructure---including a personal tour of the server rooms to underline some of his points about the hardware, Andreas Bartel on Renaissance and Uwe Fischer on documentation, as well as tours of the engineering facility and opportunities to say hello to many of the OOo developers in real life.

At the end of the very busy but fun day, those of us who still had time went out to eat together at an Italian restaurant (maybe this was to get in the mood for the OOoCon in Italy!) and, several courageous visitors even spent a second night at Motel Matthis! This time Uwe made sure we had enough beer to let us talk long into the night. Thanks, Uwe!

Some comments I received after the visit are:

thackert: "It was interesting to become acquainted with some people I'd only known the mail address or nick of, and to hear really interesting talks as well to "sightsee" SUN. All in all a nice trip and - the best of all - a really nice stay at "Motel Matthis" with a perfect hostess (Liz!)"

floeff: "Thank you very much to everyone who made this visit in Hamburg possible! I'd never been at Sun Hamburg before, and it was a really nice day meeting old and new friends, getting insight on how the OpenOffice.org development works, and after all, we also had a lot of fun and a real great time. Liz is a wonderful hostess and we all enjoyed some very special days in a community that more and more becomes a real family."

VolkerMe: "Thank you again for such a nice day, which was very much too short for me. The opportunity to have personal talks with the engineers at SUN was so interesting, I wasn't able to discuss everything, so I hope I can come back another time. And although it has been said so often: Thanks Liz for hosting the meeting, for the well-prepared accommodation and for being our always smiling guide!

Saturday came too quickly and I had to say goodbye to my delightful guests. I hope to organize another visit to thank additional and like-wise dedicated community members in 2010.

Kind regards,
Liz

tags: community user-experience

3 seats on the OpenOffice.org Community Council are to be taken by community members to represent their constituency. After the nomination and introduction period now the 3 elections are open.

Code Contributor Representative: candidate Jürgen Schmidt seeks the support of code contributors.

Product Development Representative: candidates Christoph Noack and Alexandro Colorado strive for the majority of votes from leads of accepted projects and incubator projects.

Native Language Representative: candidate Charles-H. Schulz seeks the support of leads of native language projects.

If you are a member of one of the above mentioned constituencies you will have received an email that invites you to participate. Please cast your vote until November 16.

It looks a bit complicated but there are descriptions available about the OpenOffice.org Community Council, its charter, the election process and the candidates for the November 2009 elections.

Thanks go to the helping hands running the elections as commissary (Louis, louis@ooo) and observers (Mechtilde, mechtilde@ooo; Sophie, sgauti@ooo).

PS: If you think you should have received an invitation please drop me, the commissary and observers a note (after a look in your spam folder ;-).

tags: community council openoffice.org

a follow up to blog: OOo QA Internship programm

I am proud to introduce the results from the three month individual project of the Hitek school students, which is an important and closing part inside the oo qa internship program: Sample Music Database

p.s. a lot of further info & stuff you get on the students sites

screenshots from a students sample database:

.. at the end i would like to quote Nadejda, a student from the project:

"I'd like to say THANK YOU, OOo Openoffice for this project! Thank you for opportunity to learn so many new things! The time of internship was a great time! Sometimes it was very hard but I enjoyed it. I will miss you. Good luck OOo Openoffice!"

bye Chris

tags: community ooo open open-source openoffice.org opensource qa quality software sun

tags: community framework openoffice.org

Today I want to start a little overview about the current work of the framework project community members. Fortunately we have some volunteers from RedFlag 2000 who work on several projects. This time I want to provide some information about the following enhancement:

User interface migration

If you often change the user interface of OpenOffice.org you will probably stumble over the effect that the current user interface migration is not very smart. The migration process just copies all customized user interface settings from the old to the new version. This can result that you won't see any additional menu or toolbar items included in a new version. It's clear that only a minority customize the user interface of OpenOffice.org. But this problem leads to a bad user experience for all people who like to do it. Wu Yan, a developer from RedFlag 2000, and myself talked about the root cause and how to solve it in an acceptable way. Now that a first prototype is ready I want to give you a brief overview about the features.

The user interface migration enhancement wants to provide users the ability to choose what changes are migrated into a new version. Normal users can use the default which migrates all customized changes to a new version.

You can see a screenshot of a first prototype below:

First prototype: User interface of the UI migration wizard

You can see the Writer menu differences between a customized OpenOffice.org 2.3 and 3.2 (DEV300m55). The user can delete changes or reset his/her work. „OK“ migrates the remaning entries and with „Cancel the user can abort the migration process. This user interface is just a prototype to test the implementation and have a first impression.

Attention:
If you interested in this enhancement and know how to write a specification. We are looking for volunteers who want to help us writing a good specification for this enhancement. Most developers are not good at creating a compelling user interface which can be used by normal users. Therefore people who want to join the OpenOffice.org community can provide valuable input. This is your chance to actively influence the progress of OpenOffice.org and work on an interesting enhancement.

You can contact me via e-mail or subscribe to the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome. The framework team will help you to have an easy start.

tags: community framework openoffice.org

a follow up to blog: About one year of OOo QA Reloaded

The QA Reloaded Project and the general Mentoring and Participation Concept covers a lot of possibilities to connect and synchronize the OOo QA community with the SUN QA to optimize the quality of the OOo QA productivity suite. It range from small, specialized groups like the Database QA Team who currently overtake parts of daily QA work, to the new internship program, which should be the main topic for this blog.

The history of Internship in OOo QA area started after an open mail from a representative of the Hitek Computer School - Vancouver (Canada), which is a private educational institution focused on intensive training in Software QA and Software Testing, with a question if we, the OOo Team Leads, can afford their students a practice inside OOo QA.
In principal we already had worked out such an offer inside the OOo QA Reloaded Mentoring concept, but in this case we had several students for a limited time, who need rules, lessons and leading, so our concept had to be enhanced into this direction to not exclude such community groups and keep the community vibrant. So after a lot of mail traffic, we agreed to start a first test run with two former students, which should overtake the leadership of the following student groups, after passing a basic QA training. This was also a good occasion to create and test a new concept and fit it to the belongings of student- or similar groups.
After the course Natalia and Oleg became Group Leads (GL) for their student groups (group1,group2) and joined OOo QA Teams (Calc,Writer) as Team Members. With their acquired rights and knowledge, they also start to lead their groups trough the lessons (replaced the former, more general participation step rules) which include the general techniques and QA knowledge on OOo, with a big practical contingent. We started with ten student and eight finished this basic course. To complete the program, we added an individual project to give the students the possibility to get creative, show what they can and also have a work sample for their further job applications. Unfortunately Oleg had to give up the leadership of his group, because of private reasons, and so Natalia overtook the responsibility for all students. Because of this circumstance we decided to make only one common project and create three groups with three members. At the 25 May all groups had started with the project, which will last three months: Music Database.

bye Chris

tags: community ooo open open-source openoffice.org opensource qa quality software sun

tags: community framework openoffice.org windows

For quite some time now OpenOffice.org has been working on a move from the outdated CVS to a modern Distributed Software Configuration Management (DSCM) system. Last year the Engineering Steering Committee (ESC) agreed in a face-to-face meeting to start with a switch from CVS to Subversion as an interim step.  This conversion allowed us to leave all the dead branches and legacy releases behind. The size of the new repository shrank from the projected 100 GB to actual 6 GB. Since October Subversion is in use on our codelines leading to OOo 3.1 and later versions. As it was planned, now is time to go further and migrate to a DSCM. An in-depth evaluation document has been prepared and presented. It shows the pros and cons of Bazaar, Git and Mercurial. While there is a tendency towards Mercurial there was no clear favorite.

So the ESC decided during the March 9/10 face-to-face meeting to run a survey and consult the OpenOffice.org contributors. Contributors were asked about their experience with the different existing OOo repositories, SCMs in general and most important what their prefered DSCM for the OpenOffice.org source code is.

149 contributors participated in the survey - thank you. Most of them worked with OOo's code repositories CVS and SVN. In general participants have experience with the centralized systems CVS and SVN and quite a few know distributed systems already - Mercurial is a bit more familiar than Git.


So, what distributed system do our contributors prefer for OpenOffice.org source code?

To me the correlations to general experience and OOo work were interesting. There is almost no difference in preference between the groups who worked on OOo CVS for source or OOo CVS for webcontent or OOo SVN. These are consistent with the overall result.
But looking at the ratio correlated with the general experience, we see that Mercurial users are even more enthusiastic about their system than Git users.

The bottom line?

The system of choice is for 3% Bazaar, for 23% Git and for 49% Mercurial. 25% had no preference. 

Let's see which next steps the ESC will nail down on Monday under consultation of the input from the community.

tags: community dscm openoffice.org repository survey tools

The OpenOffice.org wiki is alive and well. There is more information there than probably anyone knows or may be able to find and enjoy.

As a member of the OOo user experience project, I've created a survey to jump start a revision process for improving the usability of the wiki and therefore making that information easier to find and consume (yummy!) .

If you have ever experienced the OOo wiki, please feel free to get vocal about it by taking this quick survey.

Your wiki will thank you :-)
Liz

tags: community survey user-experience wiki

We are short before code freeze for OpenOffice.org 3.1 and I want to give you an overview about the major community contributions for the framework project. First of all I want to thank all contributors for their dedications and commitment. It's a pleasure to see how hard and target-oriented community developer work to reach their goal. This part wants to present the work from Ariel Constenla-Haile, a very active community member from Argentina. If you are involved in OpenOffice.org development you definitely stumbled over his name. Some months ago Ariel detected an issue which complained about the limited abilities of UNO AWT API regarding menus, especially setting an image for a menu item. UNO AWT is a project which provides an UNO based abstraction layer above VCL (OpenOffice.org user interface toolkit). This API is often used by extension developers to create their own user interface. The framework team received a patch for this issue from Shi Zhoubo, a developer from the RedFlag 2000 team, regarding menus and images. Ariel noticed that the patch fixes the issue but other VCL features for menus were not part. He decided to overcome the limitations of the first patch and worked on a complete solution. He analyzed the present situation and listed what features were missing. He thought about possible solutions and contacted me for discussion. We agreed to a solution which provides three additional interfaces for the missing features. He created patches for the projects involved and contributed them. Summing up Ariels contribution is a good example how people can help to fix/enhance OpenOffice.org.

The following image give you a impression what's is possible with this enhancement:

Ariel created a wiki page to explain what problems extension developers face, how to solve the problem and what's possible with his enhancement. I strongly recommend people that are interested using menus in OpenOffice.org to read his explanations.

If you want to help us to make OpenOffice.org better please contact me via e-mail or join the framework development mailing list. Everybody is welcome to join us. The framework team will help you to have an easy start. Just give it a try to become a development member of the leading open source Office suite.

In my next blog I want to continue the overview with an enhancement regarding keyboard shortcuts.

tags: community contribution framework openoffice openoffice.org