How ONLYOFFICE helps the FLISoL Bogotá DC team organize events and promote the use of free and open-source software

The FLISoL Bogotá DC team, a vibrant volunteer community of the FLISoL event in Colombia, has migrated to ONLYOFFICE Workspace allowing their members to work on documents and projects within a single collaborative environment. Kirsch Cobric from the FLISoL Bogotá DC team shares their experience and tells us how ONLYOFFICE helps them in their daily routine.

About FLISoL Bogotá DC

FLISoL Bogotá DC is an edition of the FLISoL event that is held every year in the capital city of Bogotá, Colombia. The Latin American Free Software Installation Festival (FLISoL) is an annual event with voluntary participation and free access, which has been held in different cities of Latin America since 2005 with the purpose of promoting the use of free and open-source software (FOSS) through lectures, workshops, exhibitions, face-to-face and virtual meetings, webinars and other activities.

The team behind FLISoL Bogotá DC consists of volunteers and enthusiasts whose main objective is to promote FOSS software, free culture and open-source projects, focusing on technological sovereignty. In their daily routine, the FLISoL Bogotá DC community deals with the following tasks:

• Organization of a local edition of the FLISoL event, through the voluntary participation of its members and other users, enthusiasts and experts, even from other countries;
• Creation and dissemination of knowledge that is maintained and shared through the memories of the FLISoL event represented in videos, documents and audio files;
• Support to individuals, communities, organizations and companies interested in the transition to the use of FOSS software;
• Collaboration in the creation of public policies for the adoption and development of FOSS software in the city of Bogotá.

Among the most significant achievements of FLISoL Bogotá DC is that of being a citizen initiative that has managed to influence the city’s public policy regarding the implementation of free technologies for public administration.

What a community like FLISoL Bogotá DC needs

The number of people in the community varies for each edition of the festival. The core team (the group of people who lead the management and coordination of both the event and the community) interacts with a big number of volunteers, speakers, exhibitors, workshop participants, installation technicians and artists, all living in different places and even countries. This is why a need for collaborative office software arises.

For some years, different members of the core team of FLISoL Bogotá DC used local servers with free software applications for collaborative work and co-authoring. The administration and availability of the same was a problem that made the team look for a stable and efficient solution maintained by a trusted provider, to focus on the management of the festival and not on the administration of this particular software.

Why ONLYOFFICE Workspace

To deal with document collaboration challenges and handle their documentation tasks, the FLISoL Bogotá DC team considered using an external Nextcloud provider. At the same time, they discovered the ONLYOFFICE project and created a free personal account for online collaboration. According to Kirsch Cobric, the first impression of ONLYOFFICE was quite good, so they decided to give it a try.

After a quick acquaintance with the functionality of ONLYOFFICE Workspace and its interface, the team members were interested in learning more about the ONLYOFFICE products. They also discovered the benefits of the ONLYOFFICE program for non-profits and decided to get in touch with representatives of the ONLYOFFICE team.

The FLISoL Bogotá DC team fully complied with the ONLYOFFICE criteria for non-profit organizations so they were given a free account of the cloud-based version of ONLYOFFICE Workspace with an unlimited number of users.

How ONLYOFFICE Workspace makes things simpler

The members of the FLISoL Bogotá DC team migrated to ONLYOFFICE Workspace before the 2023 edition of the FLISoL event took place so they used the platform to work on the event documentation with all involved parties.

Currently, the core members of the community use ONLYOFFICE Workspace to keep and share documentation with other team members and external users. The built-in access permission system allows them to share content in a flexible way to make sure everyone has access to the required documents only.

Apart from document collaboration, they also use the Projects module to keep track of their tasks, the Mail module to send emails and the Calendar module to keep an eye on all important events and meetings.

Although the team prefers the ODT format for internal use, they find it strategic to deal with DOCX, ONLYOFFICE’s native format, since the documentation that they share with different public and private organizations uses this extension by default. This allows the team members to have both versions of the documents (ODT and DOCX) with no significant change in their contents and collaborate in real time without any problems.

ONLYOFFICE and FLISoL Bogotá 2023

As part of its collaboration with FLISoL Bogotá DC, ONLYOFFICE became the main sponsor of the FLISoL event which was held by the local community from the 22nd of April till the 6th of May, 2023.

On the 6th of May, ONLYOFFICE representatives gave a presentation on the main problems of proprietary office software and how they can be solved with open-source tools, including ONLYOFFICE products. Moreover, ONLYOFFICE gave a warm welcome to every participant at their official stand.

Challenges on the way to success

Unfortunately, there are some challenges that the FLISoL Bogotá DC team faces when using ONLYOFFICE Workspace. After the migration from the .com domain to the local .co domain, some users partly lost their access to some documents and were unable to connect their email accounts in the Mail module. However, ONLYOFFICE support specialists helped the FLISoL Bogotá DC team members to get back on track.

ONLYOFFICE Workspace: recommended by users

Kirsch Cobric, a member of the FLISoL Bogotá DC team, shares his impression of ONLYOFFICE Workspace:

I think it is a great service, even for those organizations and companies that require more features, such as customer and community management, the functionalities that ONLYOFFICE Workspace integrates very well. Today I recommend it as the best ethical, open and robust solution in the cloud.