The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2020-06-05
Meeting Minutes
Location: Jitsi
Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht
In the meeting: Cor Nouws (Board), Lothar Becker (Chair), Michael Meeks (Board), Thorsten Behrens (Board), Daniel Rodriguez (Board), Paolo Vecchi (Deputy), Nicolas Christener (Deputy), Stephan Ficht (Admin Assistant), Florian Effenberger (Executive Director), Uwe Altmann, Simon Phipps, Italo Vignoli, Pulkit Krishna, Dennis Roczek
Representation: Nicolas for Franklin, Paolo for Emiliano
(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 7 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 13:03 Berlin time.
Agenda:
Public Part
1. Q&A: Answering Questions from the community (All, max. 10 minutes)
Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to the new board and about TDF.
* Lothar: How is the Corona situation, can we do something for the local communities?
* Daniel: We currently use our Jitsi to get in touch with the local community. Nothing else we need for the moment.
2. Inform & Discuss: Status of redmine tickets/key goals of the board (Thorsten, Nicolas, Björn, All 15min)
(for the goals see item 2 on: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/BoD_Meetings#Minutes_2020-03-13)
Rationale: Clarifying which tickets/list and Key goals, actual status of them, quaterly update, and what todo, who is caring, until when
* Nicolas: Goals are in Redmine, tickets marked as private, only visible to board right now. We could make things public and track progress there.
* Key goals from FOSDEM
1. streamline tendering process in 24 months
1.1 two more tenders signed in 6 months
+ one is awarded - close to being delivered
+ another close to being finalized - going into tech details
1.2 two more tenders delivered in 1 year
1.3 need to plan more spending for tax office.
+ this is/was completed, voted & filed & acknowledged for 2020
2. grow the pool of code committers.
2.1 hire an effective & skilled development mentor.
+ working on the job offering / tender
+ gathering feedback & improvements
+ share with the BoD likely next week for feedback.
+ is half-way done.
3. grow non-coding community
3.1 encourage Italo, Mike, Heiko, Sophie,
Olivier, Xisco, Ilmari to grow community
+ a recurring / permanent item (Florian)
+ eg. documentation meeting attendance grows
+ emphasis on growth rather doing the work (Michael)
+ can we quantify and track this ?
AI: + create some KPIs that we can measure. (Florian)
+ would like this too (Thorsten)
+ season of docs gets us a new volunteer (Florian)
4. have 5 community bonding / hackfest events before 2022
where coders & non-coders meet, ESC events.
4.1 have these in significant geographies
+ hack-fests are hard to plan for the next year (Florian)
+ wait until the end of the year - to see how things
are progressing - otherwise go virtual.
+ now have a great opportunity to learn virtual events (Thorsten)
+ can learn how to have virtual events, easier to setup
and run, with less cost involved.
+ lets take the opportunity.
+ second it (Lothar)
+ hackfest around the conference ? (Lothar)
+ Sophie mentioned mini-sumits.
+ can we get talks down in time at conf ? (Michael/Florian)
+ 30mins max - perhaps 20mins better ?
+ French community had a translation sprint (Thorsten)
+ Hackfest in Germany 2 months ago around Corona (#WirVersusVirus - Corona hackathon)
+ good ideas to steal from elsewhere.
+ meeting in person is super important; really miss it.
AI: + ask the staff if they have ideas for a virtual hackfest (Florian)
+ eg. bug-hunting sessions ? (Thorsten)
+ with Jitsi open all the time, play with it eg.
+ really support it (Cor)
+ had some 1st thinking in Dutch community some weeks ago
5. marketing must emphasise project over product
5.1 focused on new / younger contributors
5.2 more creative / pro-active marketing
+ emphasising our unique strengths.
5.3 find & turn USPs into nice stories about
the project
5.4 encourage OpenOffice users to join us pro-actively.
6. Ask team to evaluate new tooling and
involve the community in the discussion.
e.g. Discourse as AskBot replacement; also matrix/riot/chat
6.1 team to present workshop at LibOCon 2020
6.2 decision yes/no/where to go by LibOCon 2021
7. create campus programme for student ambassadors
to attract contributors
7.1 write programme description by end of February
7.2 pilot & move to goal of finding 5 students by April
for six month evaluation appointments
7.3 re-evaluate wrt. scaling this up by libocon 2020
+ timeline has shifted, people not present at universities
+ budget is approved Eur 12k - for travel & rental space
+ do we really need to travel ? (Michael)
+ at Sun - asked for applications (Simon)
+ advertised as jobs people applied for
+ normal application, interview & app't process
+ doesn't need to go there to do it
+ local ambassadors may have costs (Florian)
+ want to foster local activies
+ ideally with existing members already there.
+ tended to give fixed annual budget (Simon)
+ got a quarterly report back to co-ordinator
+ who mentored, ran events, provided resources.
+ ran a monthly meetup for ambassadors
+ admin costs too for transferring money (Florian
+ can we do this now ? (Michael)
+ digital campus' can still be recruited on
+ hard to get co-operation from universities (Italo)
+ if we pay them for doing it, sorting out how we do that
would be quite difficult.
+ talking to staff from University of Luxembourg (Paolo)
+ would love more information on spreading LibreOffice there.
8. Enable the creation of an effective TDC organization
8.1 complete negotiation of TM agreement by May
8.2 align marketing with TDC
+ this is being radically re-evaluated currently
+ ongoing work (Florian)
* how does BoD track action items & make progress (Thorsten)
+ might make things public in redmine (?)
+ nice progress indicators on tickets - BoD could update that
+ in BoD - can discuss later, how we do the daily work
+ who does what until the next call
+ track in redmine, or wiki for that.
AI: Florian to add updates to Redmine tickets and make public where possible, announce to lists
3. Inform & Discuss: LOOL solution proposals (Franklin, Michael, Paolo, Thorsten, Italo, All 20min)
(for documents see Nextcloud: ?)
Rationale: Status quo, Discussion of written proposals/documents, further procedure
* Lothar: Seems things turning into some meta-topic wrt. marketing plan
+ Italo should presen the plan (Paolo)
+ last BoD meeting idea of having board members write something
+ has evolved into working with specialists
+ to create a basis from which we can start
+ disjoint from TDF app-stors question (Michael / Thorsten)
+ some consensus on having things in a separate entity
+ still under discussion (Paolo)
+ but want to discuss this in a neutral way
+ still evaluating this.
+ make sense to de-couple this to avoid confusion (Paolo/Thorsten)
+ Summary of dicussion (Italo)
+ document is a draft of a presentation (Paolo)
+ not yet a document, the start of the conversation
+ the relationship / connection between TDF & ecosystem is
still being explored.
+ how we can deal with apps / LOOL etc.
+ it is a complex matter
+ various elements to take into consideration
+ like to start working on.
+ commitment to do this openly (Lothar)
+ Italo is doing a starting draft (Paolo)
+ need to produce action items from this.
+ positive progress (Michael)
+ we start to understand the problems.
+ consensus fixing any one of them - is not great
=> we need several interlocking changes to move
somewhere else that makes sense.
+ now doing groundwork for having LOOL bits done (Lothar)
+ not just LOOL, there are bits that need to work together (Paolo)
+ starting to update the website, new brands etc.
+ Italo can bring in feedback from the mailing list.
+ a general marketing plan for TDF ? (Uwe)
+ yes; part of it - todos for LOOL (Lothar)
+ Italo can now speak
+ distributed a draft
+ close to final - but some details are missing
+ but the main idea is:
+ common & consistent message for outside world
+ necessary to make people easy to identify.
+ as belonging to the LibreOffice project
+ group project communication under this umbrella.
+ companies can do their own communication.
+ one version from volunteers - easy to identify
+ LibreOfice Home vs. LibreOffice Community eg.
+ messages support characteristics of this.
+ can drop Fresh/Still and find something easier
to remember by people.
+ community developed / released version will have
the same messages / same tags.
+ have a clear element of the project: ecosystem
+ so far has never been clearly identified
+ as an element of the project.
+ have the "LibreOffice business" umbrella brand
only used by ecosystem companies.
+ similar but opposite tags ...
+ eg. volunteer support vs. professionally supported.
+ find an agreement
+ one large umbrella / reference name:
+ LibreOffice Project
+ LibreOffice Home / Community / Whatever
+ LibreOffice Business
+ can be used for any version of the S/W
+ Desktop / Online / Mobile
+ perhaps Mobile is not a pro. product
+ mobile suites not professional product.
+ having a differentiator
+ one of the ideas -> have a clear visual sign
that provides differentiation:
+ between volunteer supported & pro supported.
+ stronger characterization of difference
+ ensure that is a close connection of ecosystem to project.
+ having a website - clearly "LibreOffice Business" related
+ indepedent from TDF.
+ but co-ordinated with TDF.
+ with a higher degree of freedom wording the products
+ volunteer supported one:
"if you are business you should buy from an
ecosystem company" - perhaps problematic on TDF premesis
+ room for improvement:
+ in document distributed - don't focus on details
+ so it can be messages to the outside world
+ for the LibreOffice 7.0 announcement.
+ want mid-late July something finalized.
+ Good to expand scary sounding slides (Michael)
+ make it more concrete & clear - a couple in particular.
+ propose expand that and see it published (Lothar)
+ Good to see discussed (Cor)
+ would like to see a few things clarified before sending out too
+ Community Support (Michael)
+ marketing has helpfully removed 'support' here and there
+ if support is the thing we build demand for - having
free 'community support' under-cuts this.
+ idea - speak not as TDF, but as the LibreOffice project (Italo)
+ press releases - not TDF announces, but LibreOffice Project
announcements
+ a small detail - but LibreOffice is tougher to identify as
a company - whereas TDF can look like one.
+ explain why we speak as a project - after 10 years, speak
as a project - not a foundation.
+ a detail to discuss later.
+ agree - nuances in the wording.
+ point out the issues - but don't block on details.
+ want to integrate the marketing messages (Italo)
+ into a general strategy - with agreed actions
+ companies free to do whatever they want in their marketing.
+ co-ordinated releases (Cor?)
+ some discussion here.
+ lets not get bogged down in details (Italo/Lothar)
AI: + Paolo/Franklin/Michael/Thorsten/Mike/Italo -> continue working on this.
+ need legal / contract / TM bits -> that come out too (Michael)
+ use these to support this initiative.
Public meeting ends at 13:54 Berlin time.
Agenda items of private part:
4. Inform & Discuss: Part2 of Status of redmine tickets/key goals of the board (Thorsten, Nicolas, board members 10min)
Reason why in private: if needed when confidential information is included in topic above
Lothar Becker (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)