It was a historical meetup of LibreOffice Community in India indeed! It was the first LibreOffice meetup in India. We ideated for starting LibreOffice activities in India during my Red Hat days. Last year, few of us participated in LibreOffice Conference, Aarhus, Denmark. We saw the level of real volunteer participation from all over the world for LibreOffice and no doubt several of us were inspired much. I discussed with Chandrakant and decided that it is already late and we should start as soon as possible on our own level. And this small meetup is the output of what we discussed. We have planned for much more in this year.
A successful meetup - almost twenty people participated in the meetup. We decied to do it on Sunday 17 January and SocialCops came forward to help us by hosting it in its beautiful office situated at Saket area. The most important achievement of the meetup was to get contributors for Garhwali and Angika languages for LibreOffice. It is important to know that both these languages are specified as endangered languages on the UNESCO language atlas. The native Garhwali speaker Kusum Rawat filed the bug at glibc for Garhwali language by adding locale file for the language.
Professor of Indian Institute of Mass Communication Hemant Joshi was excited to see the development in the language front and he said that digital presence of these languages will be able to enpower them. He add that these types of work has far reaching impact. He told that he will help to start the work in kumaoni language.Chandan, of Red Hat, came from Pune to partcipate in the meetup and we started the meetup with his
presentation. He discussed in detail about the LibreOffice Android version and LibreOffice online. Trishul Goel, of Merination, talked about the contribution in the field of technical verticals of LIbreOffice. Chandan showed about how to work on Pootle as well.
Nishant and Neha, volunteers working for FUEL Project, showed the new website design to the audience present. FUEL Project, a project working for creating standard linguistic resources, is supporting LibreOffice in India.
At the end of the meetup, before the open discussion, I talked about the present condition of LibreOffice in India and discussed how we are planning to do year long activities in India. I am excited. We are getting good response as well. Chandrakant has created a meetup group for LibreOffice India. We have Facebook group as well with LibreIndia name.
We were 20 today, hope to be 200 in another six months and 2000 in another two years. And offcourse your support is essential.
