Board of Directors Meeting 2020-07-31

The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2020-07-31
Meeting Minutes

Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht

In the meeting: Lothar Becker (Chair), Franklin Weng (Deputy Chair), Cor Nouws (Board), Heiko Tietze, Florian Effenberger (ED), Michael Weghorn, Uwe Altmann, Stephan Ficht (AA), Daniel Rodriguez (Board), Nicolas Christener (Deputy), Dennis Roczek (MC), Paolo Vecchi (Deputy), Emiliano Vavassori (Board), Italo Vignoli, Michael Meeks (Board)

Representation: Paolo for Thorsten
(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 13:02 Berlin time.

Agenda

Public part

1. Q&A: Answering auestions from the community (everyone, 5 minutes)
    Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to the board and about TDF
    Lothar asking for any questions / suggestions?
    + Lothar asks about Hispanic online meeting
      + people from different countries participating, increasing audience (Daniel)
      + Had almost six hours of translations, nine talks, six countries
      + Spain, Mexico, Brasil, Costa Rica, Chile
      + Italo and Olivier joined too
      + Videos are also on YouTube
      + Increasing audience
      + Any specific content or speeches we should be aware of? (Lothar)
      + someone from Venezuela doing Dashboard (Daniel)
      + 800 people in the telegram group, big number
      + getting more people joining the community thanks to the events
    + Lothar asking if Daniel's proposed tool was discussed
      + first testing with small (Hispanic) group
      + asking for VPS on TDF infra to evaluate, will then come back with proposal
    + LibreOffice Asia in 2020 is cancelled because the original purpose was to let users in Taiwanese
    government users to meet international community friends, hence not plan to convert it to online
    either
      + COSCUP tomorrow, biggest annual FLOSS conference in Taiwan, will have a talk about ODF to
        newbie users in non-profit organizations (Franklin)

AI Stephan: update ticket #3251 with the above information

2. Inform & Discuss: Status of public board action items (everyone, 5 minutes)
    Rationale: Provide a status update about the public board action items

    form sub-group to work out and publish business entity proposals (Paolo)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3294
    Status: Pending feedback

    coordination of LibOCon internal meetings (Sophie)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3293
    Status: Sophie asking team and MC what they prefer, then follow-up to BoD

    Next Decade Manifesto (Lothar)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3288
    Status: Postponed to after marketing plan

    Digital tool for participation improvement (Daniel)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3251
    Status: Collecting ideas and sharing with community

    LibreOffice 7.0/7.1 marketing plan (Paolo, Franklin, Michael, Thorsten, Mike, Italo)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/3206
    Status: Continue working on this

    Membership Committee election (Florian)
    URL: https://redmine.documentfoundation.org/issues/803
    Status: Started. Nomination phase until August 27. Election afterwards.

Public meeting ends at 13:17 Berlin time.

Agenda items of private part

3. Discuss: Internal and external communication and processes (everyone, 7 minutes)
    Reason why in private: Discussion about internal rules of procedures
    Rationale: How to improve our process in preparing, voting and timeboxing decisions; how to handle internal and external communication

4. Inform & Discuss: Status of private board action items (everyone, 5 minutes)
    Reason why in private: Discussion about private tickets
    Rationale: Provide a status update about the public board action items

Private meeting ends at 13:35 Berlin time.

Lothar Becker (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)

Hi
a maybe dumb question:

Agenda items of private part

3. Discuss: Internal and external communication and processes (everyone, 7 minutes)
   Reason why in private: Discussion about internal rules of procedures
   Rationale: How to improve our process in preparing, voting and timeboxing decisions; how to handle internal and external communication

Shouldn't be these processes/rules and their discussion (not the specific content by case) made public?