The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2020-03-27
Meeting Minutes
Location: BigBlueButton
Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht
In the meeting: Lothar (Chair), Franklin (Deputy Chair), Cor (Board), Michael (Board), Emiliano (Board), Thorsten (Board), Daniel (Board), Nicolas (Deputy), Paolo (Deputy), Florian (ED), Stephan (AA), Dennis, Ilmari, Michael W, Kendy, Regis, Uwe
Representation: None
(See https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/ subject "Representation statements")
Chairman of the Board is in the meeting. One of the Chairman 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 4 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 meeting 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 13:02 Berlin time.
Agenda:
Public Part
1. Q&A: Answering Questions from the community (Lothar and Franklin, max. 15 minutes)
Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to the new board and about TDF.
Lothar: invite for questions; is anything BoD could do wrt to Coronavirus?
Ilmari: date to decide LibOCon, have it as virtual conference instead?
Florian: call w OpenSuse next week to decide e.g. hotel bookings, logistics, other bookings etc.; have to wait till May, Bavarian authorities will announce news after easter, don't expect news before Easter
Thorsten: pls don't book travels right now, untill situation will be clarified; expecting 2-3 months before LibOCon when people will begin to book;
want can we do to support e.g. schools perhaps even from the infra side? help to mitigate, core to TDF's mission; not for general public but e.g. for schools
Florian: e-learning platforms were partially down; providing materials, conferencing, collaborative editing?
Thorsten: selective access to e.g. Nextcloud, LibreOffice online; spin out a separate VM. Where to discuss that? website list
Paolo: decentralize tools, provide VMs
Dennis: in the Baden-Württemberg-country teachers are not prepared to handle group-learning, issues w migration from private server to public
Lothar: continue discussion on other platform
Dennis: TDC paper is stalled - is that Coronavirus ?
Michael: Still stalled based on Staff & comunity's concerns, nothing is going to happen without sorting this out.
Lothar: will see if we can get an intermediate document describing what we want to do in next days / 1-2 weeks.
Thorsten: Corona weighs down on people's time including Mike's
2. Information: Annual report, finances and budget (Florian, 10min)
Rational: giving informations, bringing transparency to process/deadlines, planing follow ups
Lothar: Florian to give explanations
Florian: report consists of activity report and financial report (incl. reserve building)
for activity report - nothing missing, team is writing the English version for approval, in parallel will be translated into German to hand over to the authorities
for financial report - approval of accountant-prepared closing ledgers, plus reserve building, i.e. budget planning for 2020
AI: to agree about budgets (see on Nextcloud)
Lothar: concrete timeline?
Florian: need first agreement from BoD to finalize, should have this as topic for the next board call
Michael: previously we had a community process, involving the ESC, generating ideas, costing them & ranking them
Thorsten: agree, need to get ideas done & costed, call-out for annual budget planning went out to NLP community
Michael/Thorsten: need to take this to the ESC ASAP, not great to not have much time here.
AI: Italo/Florian follow-up with NLC project
AI: Thorsten/Michael follow-up with ESC
AI: Florian: factor in estimations, eg templates, student program, fix tendering and other key goals etc.
Thorsten: plan to get an idea of how much discretionary budget is available
Florian: broad-idea is in the spreadsheet, previous BoD's approved budget is included in there. Approved, not yet spent Eur 170k, and on top another Eur 155k.
Lothar: will be a reminder, then after next week bring all to the budget
Michael: need to get estimation of budget needed to meet key goals eg. fix tendering legal budget etc.
Florian: Budget needs to be finished by end of April to have filings prepared.
For previous years, see https://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/financials/ and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Ledgers
3. Information, Discussion: LPI agreement (South America) for certification (Daniel, 10min)
Rational: information what was asked, status quo, discussion about follow on
Lothar: Daniel to explain LPI agreement
Daniel: proposal a desktop user certification not especially LibreOffice (certify users for basic tasks on FLOSS desktop); user capacity to do minimum steps; important to gather more volunteers in the community
Lothar: inquiries done, not to do it only at South America,
Daniel: possibility to reach out worlwide
Daniel: use LPI knowledge for certification
Cor: has to be worked out in detail, likes the idea
Lothar: bring it to certification committee? commonly approved
4. Status quo about / Tracking of Board Actions Items/ToDos/Goals in Redmine (Lothar 5min)
Rational: clarifying single point of search for todos and status, timeline, involved persons, clarifying needed confidentiality for which one
Lothar: idea to use redmine (Nicolas prepared a lot)
Cor: risk to have too many small tickets/put every small task into a ticket, in general good idea
Lothar: some todos left in some minutes, we don't rememnber to do them
Cor: Is it important enough then?
Lothar: keep the middle way
Lothar: other questions from the audience? > NO
Lothar: Please take care of yourselves during these times, and let us know if there's anything we can do to help.
Public part ends 13:37 Berlin time.
Lothar Becker (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)