The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2018-12-07
Call Minutes
Location: Jitsi
Session chair: Marina Latini
Keeper of the minutes: Michael Meeks
In the call: Marina (Chair), Thorsten (BoD), Florian (ED), Michael (BoD), Kendy (Deputy), Cor (BoD), Simon (Deputy), Björn (Deputy Chair)
Representation: Kendy for Franklin
Chairwoman of the Board is in the call. One of the Chairwoman or Deputy Chairman is required to be present or represented for having a quorate call.
The Board of Directors at 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 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 and invitation happened in time. 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 14:04 Berlin time.
Public part:
1) Discuss: LibreOffice Online for other organizations (Simon) [10min]
+ OSI are ready to test this out
+ proposal is to provide system setup & support for them
+ discussing with FSFE as well
+ POSS - discussed with LPI - also interested in using vs their NC
+ proposal is to try this out, and see what happens.
+ hope to have something to discuss by FOSDEM
+ happy but we badly need to fix our marketing emphasis (Michael)
2) Discuss: quarterly reports (Marina) [15min]
* employees: Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens
+ emphasis is on Florian to oversee the team these days
+ though we need to get his annual review / adjustments sorted
+ an ongoing discussion here, and some research ongoing
+ will bring a proposal to the board when that's done.
+ happy to see the updates / adjustments of employees
* infrastructure: Franklin Weng, Jan Holešovský
+ two changes:
+ tinderbox from Kendy to Christian
+ failing builds in gandalf buildbot
+ H/W from Norbert, hosted by SUSE - a bit hard to upgrade
+ ongoing discussions here.
+ ordered a new mac-mini for mid-dec. for CI.
+ Guilhelm inserted as admin for ~all freedesktop lists.
* QA: Cor Nouws, Marina Latini
+ time pressure issues for Cor
+ excellent contribs from local communities; local QA events
+ e.g. organized by Muhammet & Franklin & OpenLabs
+ notebookbar - no longer in experimental mode for 6.2
+ expecting more bugs here in lead up to 6.2 final
+ encouraged by the job design team doing around UX
+ some risk around turning on unfinished features with no-one to fix (Michael)
* documentation: Marina Latini, Jan Holešovský, Osvaldo Gervasi
+ ongoing: online help editor, mostly done by Mike
+ next milestone TBD for newstyle documentation workflow
* native language projects, translation, marketing, non-English QA activities etc: Franklin Weng, Osvaldo Gervasi
+ <pending>
* certifications and other business development activities: Franklin Weng, Marina Latini
+ next session during FOSDEM
+ lots of applications from Taiwan expected
* development: Michael Meeks, Eike Rathke
+ going reasonably well
+ ESC continues to meet, bug stats look ok
+ process is ok
+ always need more work done.
+ do we need ESC / BoD joint session at FOSDEM ? (Simon)
+ perhaps the wrong people to ask ? (Thorsten, Michael)
+ board is well represented there.
+ perhaps have a community session & explicitly invite the ESC (Bjoern)
AI: + come up with a time to put on the ESC Agenda (Florian/Marina/Bjoern)
+ not >20mins - give a summary of what we discussed (Bjoern)
+ Sat - TDF dinner at beta-co-working; 7:30 - 8:00 or so ? (Florian)
+ charm people in with food there(?).
+ how attractive to travel out there ? (Thorsten)
+ do it during the hack-fest intead ? (Michael)
+ FOSDEM - MC is there discussing tooling too (Florian)
+ missing a development mentor (Thorsten)
* license: Simon Phipps, Michael Meeks
+ hoping to move popplar -> pdfium at some stage - faster, cleaner.
+ otherwise normal work.
* releases including schedules: Michael Meeks, Björn Michaelsen
+ didn't miss any, no accidents.
+ time based release train working.
* events: Cor Nouws, Björn Michaelsen
+ started with C++ lectures - Dec 13th, be there ...
+ usual Hackfest activity: upcoming FOSDEM, Tirana, Paris ...
* affiliations, e.g. advisory board, peer foundations, politics: Björn Michaelsen, Simon Phipps
+ new AB member pending - a good example for the future
+ supporting COSM which continues to do good work editing the ODF 1.3 spec.
* marketing, communication & design: Cor Nouws, Franklin Weng
+ nothing special to mention
+ good activity in fund-raising campaign
* assets, finance: Thorsten Behrens, Cor Nouws
+ things going well - almost everything in the hands of Florian
+ last year to end of Nov Eur 660k, this year at Eur 747k in donations
+ recurring donations are 14% of all new donations, and 6% of the amount.
* contracts, hiring, taxes, legal compliance, GDPR, trademarks and brands: Simon Phipps, Eike Rathke
Public call ends 14:38 Berlin time.
Marina Latini (Session chair)
Michael Meeks (Keeper of the minutes)