Hiroyoshi Sudo
For the past year and a half, I've been actively contributing to the LibreOffice community, participating in weekly HackFests which have enabled me to provide assistance on Ask LibreOffice and engage in translation projects to make this powerful open-source suite more accessible.
Session
I'll introduce methods for building and maintaining local language support communities within global open source projects. This session shares practical insights from the LibreOffice Japanese Community Forum that you can immediately apply to your community activities.
The LibreOffice Community Forum is an official Q&A site where users can ask questions in their native language. For such platforms to succeed, they need both incoming questions and active community members providing answers—a challenge faced by open source projects worldwide.
Japan's LibreOffice community developed a unique approach: weekly online Hackfest events where members collectively answer forum questions. I'll explain how regular scheduling creates responsibility and momentum among volunteers, transforming support from individual work to group activity, building a sustainable support system.
I'll also discuss how we incorporated Japanese cultural elements while adapting global best practices to regional needs. The session will present case studies of particularly challenging or interesting forum questions, demonstrating how community teamwork led to effective solutions.
Please join us to discover how each individual's small contributions make a significant difference, and how supporting users in their native language creates a more inclusive and sustainable open source ecosystem.