Hi all, sorry, that our annual report gets rather long, but there is still a lot missing. First, many thanks to Marko, Florian and André for their terrific work writing this report.
We mention some numbers about the germanophone project (but keep in mind, don't trust statistics, cause they never ever show a mirror of the real world :-) ). ###number of members and active members## In 2007 we had 310 registered observers, 36 with developer state (or higher). The count of (permanent) active community members is something between the developer count and 50. Some of our active members are involved and very active in other projects on OpenOffice.org and in other teams outside OOo too. On the German mailing lists we had in 2007 a total count of 20190 messages, most of them on users (12363) and dev (4350) with peaks every time a new built was published. ##number of users and downloads## Unfortunately we cannot provide detailed numbers about users or downloads. Although we have seen some administrations and companies migrating to OOo in 2007, there have not been “big news” about that. We feel that our user base and general interest in OpenOffice.org is growing. Requests from DLGI (who is maintaining the ECDL in Germany), Federal Ministry of Economics (who asked the project for input on the OOXML debate) or the University of Bayreuth (who asked for distribution of our “PrOOo-Box” to all newcomer students) are indicating that. We have seen several schools or educational administrations who provide an “electronic pencil case” (USB drive with portable free software, including OOo) for their students in the last months. As we do not use bouncer and the download-statistics integration for our download page do not seem to work, we have no current download numbers. The only estimation we can give is that 30% of all downloads for 2.3.1 that have been distributed vie torrent network are German builds. ##issues with localization and/or outstanding, "popular" issues## Biggest issue with localization was to get the work flow going. As OOo 2.3 was the first version where German became a localization, this was the first time for us to provide the UI localization. So OOo 2.3 and CWS mergede01 got extensive testing as well from our side. Although the quality of the OOo spell checking engine has improved a lot, this is still an issue. A small team worked on merging two of the existing three German dictionaries, so that we will get a much better quality with upcoming releases. During this work we found, that we actually ship outdated versions of all our dictionaries and the corresponding issue seems to be stalled at the moment. There is no single “popular” issue, but we had several discussions that voices from experienced users are not heard by developers. (This was once again a request at the Community council session in Barcelona). With the new UX project and more transparent specification process, this is better now and some of our project members participate actively in those processes. (That doesn't mean, that all is perfect ) ##resources description or more stringently, a description of your lack of resources## Although a team of about 50 active members may look like a huge number, this is what we are missing most – active members. Almost all of our team members are “multi talents” - doing marketing, documentation, translation, user support, qa ... this leads to lack of resources when it comes to a release (esp. if we have some other events at the same time). Besides that we are missing active members outside Germany – So Switzerland has only a very small team, Austria almost none and other regions (such as South Tyrol, which has a good user base) cannot be covered at all. ##general activities## As you know we have a very active documentation team which is also active on OOoAuthors.org. Two big goals in 2007 were the complete German edition of the OOoAuthors.org Writer guide, many other translations and the network installation and setup customize guide. The writer guide is fully translated and available at our website. Many documents like the German setup guide and the FAQ are every time in focus and updated permanently. There are activities to get our web pages more user friendly as you can see it on the new German homepage on de.openoffice.org and on the pages of the documentation team and several other pages too. In 2007 we give 'green light' for QAed German versions of OpenOffice.org for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. Last time (2.3.1) we had 9 German packages (3 Linux, 2 Windows, 2 Solaris and 2 Mac OSX) a big goal thanks the work of our QA team. In addition to release testing, we did extensive testing on the Chart2 CWS build and verified / closed a large number of Chart2 Issues in an IRC session together with the Chart developers. Members of our team work on two OOo-related software “distributions”: The PrOOo-Box team has published new versions of the CD an DVD distributions close to the release dates. We have now one multiplatform DVD and three (platform specific) CD images. A small but excellent team has been working hard to provide current versions of OpenOffice.org Portable in German on PortableApps.com. This version and the “OOo portable plus” suite on a labeled USB stick is one of our most popular gadgets. Unfortunately there are troubles to update the OOo portable plus suite, as this is in conflict with Mozilla's trademark policies. We had two get-togethers of active community members – the QA-Weekend in May (16 members including some well known “Sunnies”) and a project Weekend in July (12 members talking about current activities, changing knowledge and folding 100 PrOOo-Boxes :) ). More about get-togethers in marketing section. ##finances (if any)## Most of our finances are handled by OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. The income is mainly based on free (small) donations and donations we get as return for give-aways (like the USB sticks, a real boxed version of the PrOOo-Box dvd, and a 300 pages booklet about OOo, written by community members). The booklet should get special attention, as the initial edition of 1600 booklets was sold out within 4 months. Money was spent for several things. So we partially fund traveling and lodging for people representing OOo at events, we need to pre-pay our giveaways. We pay for one dedicated server that hosts our associations website, is used as Linux buildbot, hosts QATrack production and development site and a bittorrent tracker / seed. The financial report is published yet, so I cannot give detailed numbers. ##marketing activities## Many :) From a marketing point of view, the year 2007 was a quite successful one for the Germanophone community. We had a lot of activities, and traditionally, one of our main focuses is on events and trade shows. In 2007, we had between 20 and 30 events the project attended, presenting the program and community to interested visitors. Each and any event is quite important for us, but there are two events we'd like to mention in detail: CeBIT and Systems. Although some don't seem to know :-) , CeBIT is one of the most important and largest IT trade shows worldwide, being internationally recognized, and takes place in Hannover, Germany. In 2007 we had a booth organized by the association OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. and shared it with six co-exhibitors, one of them Sun Microsystems! The cooperation was brilliant and we had a great time together, helping users, squeezing out bugs and marketing OpenOffice.org. We have a similar concept for the Systems trade show in Munich, Germany, which was very successful as well. For marketing OpenOffice.org, we have a close connection to the German press, knowing many of the journalists in persona. We built our own press distribution system with currently about 150 recipients that is being used widely for distributing press releases. Another way of getting in touch with people are "Stammtische", regular user meetings we initiated in several regions of Germany. Project members, governmental people, brave journalists :-) , interested users and enterprises meet there to discuss about OpenOffice.org, life and love. :-) It is a great idea to meet people, and we encourage everyone to try it out yourself! This is also a way to marketing “to the project”, just like the QA-Weekend and Project-Weekend. Looking at the Germanophone project, it not only covers Germany, but also Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Most activity takes place inside Germany, as most contributors live there, but we try to push things forward for other countries as well. Regarding Austria, at the moment there is not much activity going on, although a website and an association exists there as well. In order to avoid confusion, we decided to temporarily remove the Austrian pages and links and lead people to the German contacts. We did this in accordance with the Austrian contact persons, who admitted that at the moment, they have too less contributors. We plan on supporting Austria and Switzerland as good as possible, but unfortunately, for most volunteers, it is a problem of time and funding to also attend events in these countries. And this is where we get to the drawbacks of engagement: Usually it is a small group of people who attend a lot of events and trade shows, which means they spend a lot of time and money. Some community members attend more than 24 events per year (i.e. two per month), in their free time, without own business interest, and have to spend several thousand euros from their own money for their activity. Just a simple example: Attending the CeBIT, even after some funding, costs everyone between 200 and 400 EUR... We all hope that our major enterprise contributors can help with funding this engagement in the future. We consider it a crucial problem. OpenOffice.org is on spotlight more and more, and people engaging themselves in a continuous manner are hard to find, so current contributors are overworked and even paying for their engagement. We need to find more supporters who donate money and other resources in order to keep up the work everyone is doing. ##users support## User support is mainly done on our users mailing list. Handling about 200 to 250 mails per week, this is a great source of knowledge. The team at the mailing list is very vital – although some of the “old members” need to leave the list, new members join and answer other member's question. A special thing about our mailing list is, that we are in the lucky situation to have some core developers subscribed to the list, who speak German. In addition to the mailing list we provide documentation and FAQ directly in the project. Both sub-projects are very vital, as already mentioned. But we have started to share knowledge, resources and members with projects that have started outside the main OOo website. At least the Ooo-Wiki (www.ooowiki.de) and the German OOo user forum (de.openoffice.info) should be mentioned. Members of the Germanophone project provide content and knowledge there but bring experience and new ideas in return. ##most important achievement / failure## An important achievement was our first “real” translation work for the OOo user interface. But with all the things going on, it is hard to tell what was “most important”. Maybe one could name the constant contributions of our members as “most important”. We also had some negative experiences we want to share with you. In spring, we tried to do a contest with eBay, with awarded prizes of about 10.000 EUR. The idea was to combine the powerful API and macro language of OpenOffice.org with eBay solutions, and we had various ideas on what could be done. However, although we did a lot of press relations and also extended the deadline, we only had two applicants for three prizes. In general, the experience with contests has not been good the last times, so currently we tend to not doing any more contests at the moment. Another idea that didn't work out was this year's CampOpenOffice.org. Started successfully in 2006 to support young contributors, we only had five applicants this year, quite too less for our ideas. We eventually want to re-launch this idea for this summer with a slightly modified focus, so stay tuned on what will happen. The last race we've lost this year was the DIN vote on the ISO ballot for standardization of MSOOXML. Unfortunately, the German standards body (DIN) decided to vote “yes” for MS OOXML with comments. Now we're hoping for a senseful decision of the ISO in February, so keep up fighting, Charles! :-) All in all, the year 2007 was a fabolous one for the Germanophone community, and we think we're very well prepared for the exciting things that we're awaiting for 2008! For all who like to meet us, there are at least two interesting events: CeBIT Hannover, 4-9 March (http://www.cebit.de/homepage_e) – one of the most important IT-fairs, we will get a number of vistor tickets for free. LinuxTag Berlin, 28-31 May ( http://www.linuxtag.org/2008/en/home/welcome.html) – biggest Linux / FOSS event in Germany with focus on user / community. We will get one (or even two) OOo-day, a dedicated room / track for OpenOffice.org. Regards, Jacqueline -- ## Co-Lead de.openoffice.org ## http://de.openoffice.org - www.openoffice.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
