Suraj Bhattarai, our Community Liaison from Nepal, shares some positive words around the LibreOffice project, among students of IOE Purwanchal Campus enrolled in CS50x Nepal. The LibreOffice orientation scheduled for two hours on 21st February 2024 at MSC special classroom of the same campus was a special session in the CS50x Nepal timeline. The session delivered by our liaison gave a general overview around LibreOffice project, The Document Foundation, The Document Liberation project, past activities carried out by the local Nepali community. The session also covered customization tips and tricks for familiarity and how to contribute or connect in the community. Moreover, the session organized for 30 CS50x Students included a total participation of 47 people, where seven of them were Nepali Community members, six were other students and the rest were the CS50x staff. The session was primarily intended to introduce LibreOffice Office Suite and provide hands-on experience with the suite, to the newly enrolled, first-year students in the campus, who were actually enrolled for the CS50x classes.
The session had a breakdown as:
- 40 mins of talk,
- 30 mins of quick presentation competition using LibreOffice impress,
- 30 mins of release party cake and celebration,
- And lastly, 30 mins of Plane Rush competition as a fun touch to the session.
The competition was facilitated by our community volunteers, where they distributed some gifts as well. The challenge for the competition was to create a visually appealing, quick three-page presentation using LibreOffice Impress on spot, in 25 minutes. All they had to do was recreate the presentation slide version of the LibreOffice university/school (English) flyer. The gifts were obviously some LibreOffice printed T-shirt, LibreOffice printed water bottle, ‘local Community, LibreOffice, document liberation project’ stickers, pens, and pin sized batches. The same gifts were distributed to winners of the plane rush activity as well, and some light items like stickers and pens to everyone present in the session.
After some heat and hands-on experience with the LibreOffice impress, a quick survey was conducted, where 27 of the participants claimed that they tried LibreOffice for the very first time. The same survey had asked what they love about LibreOffice? And honestly, a majority of them mentioned the reason to be: Open Source, Free, compatible with MS files, community driven, cross-platform, privacy and feature-rich respectively.
The later half of the session was filled with fun as our Liaison cuts and shares the vanilla flavored Release Party Cake with everyone present in the room. The environment was really fun with flashes, noise, claps, smiles, and cameras & eyes over the cake.
Lastly, in the sunset and the open ground, they flew their own paper plane with LibreOffice PaperPlaneFront.odg. The session was totally fun and a unique experience for everyone. Yes, they did collect the planes for paper recycling later on. And with this, the day, joy, and celebration all came down to a happy ending with the effort from the Nepali Community.
