The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2016-07-18
Call Minutes
Location: Phone Conference Room
Session chair: Marina Latini
Keeper of the minutes: Michael Meeks
In the call: Marina, Michael, Thorsten, Kendy, Björn, Florian, Gabriele, Eike
Representation: Björn (Simon)
Chairwoman of the Board is in the call. One of the Chairman or Deputy is required to be present or represented for having a quorate call.
The Board of Directors at the time of the call consists of 7 seat holders without deputies. In order to be quorate, the call needs to have 1/2 of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4. A total of 6 Board of Directors members or their representatives are attending the call.
The board waives all formal statutory requirements, or requirements in the foundations articles, or other requirements regarding form and invitation, time limits, and for the topics discussed in this meeting.
The call is quorate. From now on, motions can be passed with the agreement of a simple majority of those remaining present. The majority threshold is currently 4.
The meeting commences at 17:08 Berlin time.
Public agenda:
==
1. Discuss: Quarterly report for all sub-topics in the rules of procedure,
see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_rules#Decision_making_and_responsibilities (Marina)
* Employees
+ ongoing work to improve contracts (Michael)
+ otherwise no larger issues (Thorsten)
+ growing team.
* QA (Marina)
+ internship in studio storti
+ working on mail-merge and file->properties
+ reporting bugs
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&list_id=622745&namedcmd=StudioStortiInternship
+ also doing bug confirming with Beluga.
+ internship ended, but hopefully some ongoing work
+ we see the weekly bug summary.
+ regression bugs declining - back to where they were sept 2015 (Michael)
+ needinfo / unconfirmed bugs not exploded either (Bjoern)
* Documentation (Kendy)
+ exciting progress - on help-content
+ expanding participation there.
+ worked with students on translation of it (Marina)
+ lots of work needed there.
+ team now has regular meetings.
* NLP (Eike)
+ business as usual
+ monitoring the l10n list, but not looking at marketing.
* Certification (Marina)
+ would like to involve cert. committee again
+ particularly after the open-source conf. in London
+ was an interesting reaction from attendees.
+ need to push for promoting the certifiation
+ in particular in developer area; some need customization
+ can promote list of certified developers for large migrations.
+ some campaign to promote it ? (Gabriele)
+ cf. barnstars etc.
+ before the conference - at the conf. a session
AI: + encourage Italo to market sessions at the conf. (Florian)
+ concern wrt. removing mandatory membership criteria (Florian)
+ Developer Certification (Kendy, Thorsten)
+ new people certified every quarter or so by ESC.
* Development (Bjoern)
+ no big highlights
* Releases (Bjoern)
+ 5.2.0 branch off - large number of pending patches
+ beyond that, smooth this quarter.
+ release train continues to chug along.
+ new package formats provided (not by TDF): flatpak and snap
* license (Michael)
+ dull as usual.
+ sad Symbola license situation.
+ concern when no concrete license / grasp of it (
* events (Marina)
+ had feedback from FISL in Brazil
+ interested to be in the community.
+ mail address - need to send something.
+ Gustavo and Olivier were there.
+ event in Albania
+ translation sprint.
+ need to keep in contact with lots of communities
+ create a strong relationship between foundation & NLPs
+ hack-fest in Ankarah (Michael)
+ unusually well attended.
+ concern wrt. events in India / Tokyo (Marina)
* affiliations (Bjoern)
+ GNOME and KDE join TDFs AB
+ nothing not announced elsewhere.
* Marketing / communication / design (Kendy)
+ design - lots of ongoing work from GSOC
+ lots of projects design / UX related.
+ lots of people occupied there.
+ Marketing (Marina)
+ Mike creating nice videos
+ as usual - should have a track @ conf.
+ Google Adwords - working on keywords.
+ need to improve the wiki structure.
+ Month of LibreOffice (Bjoern)
+ well received badges etc.
* Assets / finance (Thorsten)
+ donation flow - has been great for six months
+ year-over-year, between 18% to 68% up monthly.
+ long term investment planning ongoing.
+ work underway wrt. TMs etc. positive developments.
+ many thanks too to Norbert for his oversight.
* Contracts / Taxes / Compliance / Brands (Thorsten)
+ nothing terrible going on
+ lots of tedious work.
2. Discuss: MC elections (Florian)
Quick discussion how to proceed wrt. the MC elections
* Friday - filing of new members went out
* Papers being signed & sent to Berlin.
* Kick-off MC elections this week.
* Should reach-out to those who should stand for the election.
* deadlines / everything looks good (Gabriele)
Public call ended at 17:40 Berlin time
Marina Latini (Session chair)
Michael Meeks (Keeper of the minutes)