ONLYOFFICE contributor community: Interview with Stathis Iosifidis

This year we’ve become closer to our users with the created contributor and beta tester community. This gives us greater opportunities to work all together and make ONLYOFFICE even better. Today we would like to tell you about our very good friend from Greece, an open source activist and ONLYOFFICE contributor, Stathis Iosifidis.

Stathis (full name Efstathios Iosifidis) is from Thessaloniki, Greece. Graduated in veterinary medicine, works as a veterinarian, farm animal manager, and dairy products technician.

Stathis is interested in technology and gadgets, loves reading, walking and travelling:

I am addicted to the feeling of unboxing and initial use of a product. Sometimes I write articles about it.
 
 
I read articles on the Internet, or some scientific books, especially the medical ones. The best combination is technology in the medical area.
 
 
Who doesn’t like travelling? For the past year I’ve been to Brussels, Barcelona, Prague, Berlin, Nuremberg, Heraklion for open source conferences, and I have one trip left to Las Palmas where an open source medical project conference will take place. All of those trips were sponsored by the projects I promote in my country.

This year Stathis has entered a technical high school:

I did it as I don’t have a degree, although I know a couple of things about computers and technology. Usually companies in my country request to have a computer science degree to work for them. They do not care about your skills. So, this degree is the easiest to get it.

Stathis is also working on ARM boards, Nextcloud and integration with ONLYOFFICE, and soon is planning to start an animal records application at a vet practice.

Moreover, Stathis is one of the organizers of the next GUADEC (GNOME conference) that they will host in Thessaloniki.

The first experience with open source projects Stathis got when he started openSUSE Greek Community with his friend. He told us that they were very active (release parties, conferences, summer camps) so that the global community trusted them to organize the openSUSE Conference 2013. As a result, Stathis became an openSUSE member.

During that time he was also involved in GNOME with translations and presentations at conferences, release parties, etc. When the translation coordinator stepped down, Stathis was there to support the project. All that led him to become a GNOME Foundation member.

I like to be involved with open source communities. It has to do with people and not computers. We are not the people working on a screen, but we like to socialize, to hug a lot and have fun.

By that time, Stathis was involved in the ownCloud project, promoting it and translating on Transifex. Besides, he does the same for Nextcloud and follows the community very closely.

Surely, the story is not over yet. During the openSUSE Conference 2018, Stathis met Dr. Luis Falcon, was fired up with the project GNU Health and started to translate and promote it in Greece.

Our cooperation with Stathis started last year (and we’re really happy about it!).

I met marketing guys at Nextcloud conference. I didn’t know about ONLYOFFICE by that time. I installed and used it. I wrote some articles in Greek so that people would know about it. Then I decided to translate ONLYOFFICE and asked the administrators to give me access to the translation platform.

Answering the question why Stathis decided to cooperate with us, he said:

The marketing team was very friendly. I didn’t know if ONLYOFFICE had a community behind the project. I tried the desktop editors and I liked them very much. So the next step to gain users is to promote the software, to write something in a language other than English and of course translate the software. That is what I did.
 
 
Programmers create a great product that let me use it for free, I can either donate or give back to the project. A donation is a one-time thing but giving back to the project, it might make more profit for ONLYOFFICE and maybe for the programmers.

Thanks to Stathis, ONLYOFFICE was presented at the Greek FOSS conference called FOSSCOMM 2018.

FOSSCOMM is the pan-Hellenic conference for free and open source software communities. It is addressed at programmers, students and everyone who is interested in the open source movement. This year the conf was hosted by Stathis’s friends in Heraklion, Crete.

Stathis made three presentations there: one to promote GUADEC for GNOME, a Nextcloud presentation where ONLYOFFICE was mentioned as well, and also a presentation about GNU Health.

I had a booth with openSUSE, and also had promo materials from many projects, including ONLYOFFICE. After my second presentation, a guy came next day and told me that he tried ONLYOFFICE for desktop and he was amazed by how fast it is, also that it looks like MS Office and edits MS Office files without the struggle. He told me that he would try it on Nextcloud instance they have at his office.

Get inspired? If you also would like to become an ONLYOFFICE contributor, contact us directly at press@onlyoffice.com, or partners@onlyoffice.com with any questions and suggestions. We’ll be glad to hear from you!