Hi Nigel, On 15/01/2024 23:52, nigelver...@hotmail.com wrote:
Thanks for organising this evening's meeting. It was good to put faces to some of the names I see on the mailing list. I hope these will become regular events. Some very good points were raised...
Thanks a lot for joining the call! And indeed everyone else who was present. It was great to see many new faces, and get lots of ideas and feedback :-)
I was interested in Mike Saunders' point that a lot of donations are raised from the download page on the website. This suggests to me that these donations are from individuals installing the software for their own use - whether that be personal or related to their work or business.
Yes, and we suspect (and have done some research) that a big chunk of those donations-while-downloading are from users who've been using LibreOffice for a while, and are downloading an update. (After all, someone trying LibreOffice for the very first time is unlikely to donate, before knowing if they want to continue using it.)
Where LibreOffice is being rolled out across an organisation, it is likely that it is only downloaded once with the installation files then being re-used or copied multiple times. The message on the website proposing a donation will hardly be seen by anybody in that organisation. There was a suggestion to display a dialog on first use in which the case for making a donation could be made. I would support this. It means that every user would see it. Of course in an organisation it is unlikely that many users would make a donation themselves, but there would at least be the chance that the question is raised by some more technically aware users.
We have the donate bar (which appears six months after installation). When larger organisations and companies use LibreOffice, we strongly recommend them to get it from the ecosystem, to get extended support options and other benefits. That in turn helps to fund LibreOffice developers in those ecosystem companies, which improves the software for all users.
So yes, donations to TDF from organisations and companies are always welcome, but there are other ways for larger deployments to support us, as mentioned above.
Over the last 4 or 5 years, Mike has sent me 3 batches of flyers and other promotional material for me to distribute. I have indeed left copies, with permission, in business parks, high schools, the local university campus, libraries, the town hall and various other places with a large potential audience. There is no way of knowing whether my efforts have resulted in a large numbers of new users at least trying LO, or whether it has been a complete waste of time.
Thanks so much for distributing those flyers and spreading the word. If you ever need any more, just let me know, and we'll get them printed and sent to you.
Yes, it's hard to directly measure the effects of such activities, although we can potentially do more with custom links, QR codes etc. But it's ultimately "word of mouth" marketing.
If we were to have a "first use" dialog, prompting for donations, then we could also ask the user about the source of their decision to install LO e.g flyers, magazine or website article, recommendation from a friend or colleague, organisational policy, etc, etc.
Finding out where users discovered LibreOffice would indeed be useful in our marketing, but I'd be reticent to push for donations directly after installation. Most people will want to try it out and spend some time with it before thinking about donating, and prompting users for a donation before they've even started to use the app properly could generate negative feelings from the start.
But of course, that's just how I see it. What do others think? How else could we try to determine the source of users' decisions to install LO, as Nigel describes?
We are lucky that LO enables switching between a "ribbon" interface and "classic" interface. It is entirely possible that at some point we may see a gradual transition back towards a hierarchical menu system in Office 365, even if it manifests itself somewhat differently. For that reason I would caution against abandoning the classic menu option for the sake of "modernity".
AFAIK there are no plans in the Design community to drop the classic menu+toolbar user interface. There has been some discussion about using the tabbed NotebookBar as the default on new, fresh installations, which I'd be in favour of if the NotebookBar is 100% ready for everyone. But I believe it still needs some work in a few areas (eg accessibility).
The UK government decided in 2014 that open document formats would become the new public sector standard. Almost a decade later, working at times closely with government agencies, I have yet to see or receive one single document in an open format.
If you've got an example of this (not something personally sent to you, but documents on the UK government website in .docx/.xlsx format), let us know and maybe we can get in touch...
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