Availability in native languages is a major strength of OpenOffice. Communities form naturally around languages and volunteers can be immensely useful for support, localization, quality assurance, maintenance of writing aids and marketing. Starting from the long experience of the Italian-speaking community, we will see what is available and what can be improved to make involvement easier.
OpenOffice is officially released in dozens of languages, and its source code contains translations in over 100 languages, enabling a very large percentage of the world's population to use OpenOffice in their native language.
Communities form naturally around languages and volunteers from these communities can be immensely useful for support, localization, quality assurance, maintenance of writing aids and marketing.
Starting from the long experience of the Italian-speaking community, which existed before the move to the Apache Software Foundation, we will see how the project can make the most out of a native-language community and we will discuss what can be improved to make the volunteers' involvement easier.