LibreOffice Conference 2016

This year LibreOffice Conference 2016 was held again (yes, again) in Brno.  I said "again" because that two years before I also went to Brno for Akademy 2014.  But Brno is a cute city (more like a town to me) and I like there very much, and this year we had three people going there together.

The scene in Praha and Brno kept making me recall my memory, like the train station and locked restrooms.

In the morning of the community workshop I planned to go to the city center around Brno train station with my partners Jeff Huang and Mark Hung.  However I met Italo in the hall of the hotel and he asked me if I would like to attend the certification meeting.  It was my honor and I was happy to, so I  kicked my partners out and attended the meeting.

Certification Meeting

In the meeting Italo mentioned that the ODF/LibreOffice migration in Taiwan is important because it proves that ODF/LibreOffice is not only suitable to European and American countries.  We also talked about some important issues like to make trainer's certification more localized, and to make sure that being a TDF member is NOT a need to apply for certification.

This year the venue was very beautiful.  Actually it is the most beautiful venue among all the conferences I have ever attended.

The venue of LibreOffice Conference 2016

In the welcome party we met friends from Japan, Naruhiko and Shinji.  But poor Naru spent some day in the hospital... Fortunately he is okay eventually.

Jeff, Mark, Shinji and Naruhiko

This year I gave two talks.  One is about the LibreOffice macros.  I told people how I found the documents and then realized that we need some more tutorials which are appropriate for newbie macro coders.

My first talk

My second talk was still about the progress of ODF/LibreOffice migration in Taiwan.  Since my presentation last year more and more city/county governments started their training courses and communication phases.

My second talk

ODF migration map in Taiwan

The most exciting thing in this conference for me was that Italo showed this slide:

Our hard work of promoting and migrating ODF in Taiwan was seen in the world.  I hope that in a few years the migration map can be all green, and the world can see that ODF and LibreOffice are the most appropriate choices.

So, I'll keep going my work on this, and wish I can give you more good news in Rome next year!

Taiwan Launched a 3-year Project In Order To Adopt Open Document Format

Although the central government in Taiwan had worked out a national file format standard named CNS-15251 in 2009, they didn't push and force government bodies to use it. Nevertheless, since UK government selected Open Document Format to meet user's needs in July 2014, the National Information and Communications Initiative Committee (NICI), a working group composed with many departments under Executive Yuan in Taiwan, started a series of meetings and made a resolution to include ODF into the national standard (named ODF-CNS15251, which is actually ODF 1.2) and actively migrate this national standard in all government units.

In NICI's resolution, they defined "open files" as "files which don't need to rely on a certain software to open." They also mentioned that all the government bodies should use ODF-CNS15251 for editable document file, and PDF or HTML for uneditable document file.

Therefore, National Development Council (NDC), a first level unit under Executive Yuan, launched a 3-year project and split the migration into three stages:

Stage 1: Before the bottom of 2015, all the downloadable files on web sites which belongs to any government unit, should use ODF-CNS15251 or PDF file format. All the old files on web sites should be converted to ODF-CNS15251 or PDF too.

Stage 2: Before the bottom of 2016, all the files provided and exchanged between government bodies, or between government units and non-government units or enterprises should use ODF-CNS15251 or PDF file format.

Stage 3: Since 2017, ask all the government bodies to use software which can create and edit ODF-CNS15251 and can be downloaded freely forever.

This project was launched in August 2015. NDC entrusted the Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT), which is an NPO targeting on promoting free and open source software, and Gjun information Co., Ltd., which is a software cram school, to execute this project. In this project, 13 explanation sessions are held in different counties and cities of Taiwan, including outside island counties like Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang (aka Matzu). Lecturers and open source community members from SLAT are responsible to explain why and how to migrate to ODF. Besides, many real training courses are held too. The FOSS experts from SLAT are responsible for planning the course guidelines and examples in these training courses, and training lecturers in Gjun. Then lecturers of Gjun will be responsible all the training courses.

Besides NDC's project, there have been several successful stories migrating OpenOffice and LibreOffices all over Taiwan. Coretronics is a successful example for big enterprises to migrate LibreOffices. In the project of Coretronics, OSS Integral Institution Company, which was founded by a senior open source community and is experted in Open Office and LibreOffice customization and service, is responsible for helping them since 2010. Fo-Guan-Shan, which is a very big Buddist group, also migrated to OpenOffice successfully in 2014. Eric Sun, the execute secretary of Open Source Software Application Consulting Center, which is a project under the Ministry of Education and executed by SLAT, helped Fo-Guan-Shan to migrate OpenOffice. Finally, in March 2015, Yi-Lan County government also launched a project to migrate from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. This project is led by the Office of Information Administration, Planning Department in Yi-Lan County, and is executed by Sunjun Information Service Company, which was founded by many open source community members and experts. In LibreOffice Conference 2015, Franklin Weng, the President of Board of Directors in SLAT, shared the successful stories of Yi-Lan County and Coretronics in Migration track, also shared the status about the ODF migration in Taiwan.

SLAT will then cooperate with The Document Foundation, to help this migration project.

Yi-Lan County Announced That No More Microsoft Office Will Be Purchased

The above image is an official document from Yi-Lan County, Taiwan.  The subject of this document is to reiterate that all the users in Yi-Lan County, including teachers in schools, employees in the offices in all the villages and cities in Yi-Lan, and colleagues in Yi-Lan County Government, need to send documents in ODF or PDF format instead of Microsoft Office's format.  

Yi-Lan County Government also announced in this document that they will not buy and install Microsoft Office in newly purchased computers.  All the new computers need to install LibreOffice which can be downloaded in the inner file server in Yi-Lan County Government.

Besides Yi-Lan County, Yun-Lin County Government in Taiwan also took actions to warn those users who still upload or send out documents in OOXML or other non-ODF formats.  The red part of the above image said, "This attached file does not comply with the formal national standard format ODF-CNS15251" where ODF-CNS15251 is identical to ODF 1.2.

The above incidents show that Taiwan goes a bit further on the road to fully migration of ODF.  Let's applaud and cheer on them!