Organizing this year’s LibreOffice conference

Posted by agger on Monday, September 28th, 2015 0

Conference opening — Leif Lodahl opening the conference, emphasizing among other things that LibreOffice is about free software - as in freedom.

At the instigation of my colleague Leif Lodahl, I had the honour of co-organizing this year’s LibreOffice conference here in Aarhus. It was an amazing experience to see the community behind one of the world’s most important free software projects, a system with many millions of users that is a cornerstone of any attempt to migrate existing organisations away from proprietary software.

As an organizer I didn’t really have time to speak with anyone, but I did meet a lot of good people – far too many to mention, but including The Document Foundation’s director Florian Effenberger, FSFE Hamburg coordinator Eike Rathke and former FSFE employee Sam Tuke. If I manage to go to FOSDEM next year, I hope to meet some of the people again and maybe this time have a chance to talk.

There were a lot of interesting talks, many of them about some quite advanced subjects, including some of the more esoteric aspects and uses of C++11. The event was kindly hosted by the municipality of Aarhus in its new, high-tech library building Dokk1.

All in all, the conference seemed to be a success, with three days packed with talks, hackfest and other social events in the evenings and about 150 registered attendees from at least 33 countries.

Relaxing at LiboCon — Relaxing with a beer after the first day of the conference.

Preparing hackfest and dinner party — Preparations for the hackfest and dinner party - the latter part kindly hosted by the University of Aarhus