The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2020-10-23
Meeting Minutes
Location: Jitsi
Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht
In the meeting:
Board - Lothar Becker, Daniel Rodriguez, Emiliano Vavassori, Cor Nouws, Michael Meeks, Thorsten Behrens (from 13:10 on)
Board Deputies - Paolo Vecchi, Nicolas Christener
Team - Stephan Ficht, Florian Effenberger, Sophie Gautier, Olivier Hallot, Heiko Tietze (from 13:19 on)
Community - Michael Weghorn
Representation: Nicolas Christener for Franklin Weng
(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 13:04 Berlin time.
Public part
1. Q&A: Answering Questions from the community (All, max. 10 min)
Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions to the board and about TDF.
* Olivier: Discussion about dropping LibreOffice Online from the foundation.
* Am not in favor of this. LOOL code, documentation, wiki pages etc. are assets of the foundation.
* As such, foundation is custodian of the content, should neither erase nor drop existing contents.
* Understands decision is way beyond the board.
* All these assets contain energy of members and constituents of the foundation.
* Begs to not delete, drop or erase any contents of LibreOffice Online.
2. Discuss: Focussing and prioritizing, sorting goals and action items for the board in the light of LibO Con meetings (Lothar/Florian, All 20min)
Rationale: Answering questions, discuss situation, suggest further steps with it, suggestion was: identify 5 most important and fokus energy/time on them and to bring them first to results, rest on hold until new weighting (after 6 weeks)
* Lothar: Need to have all items on the lists that are urgent or important or both.
* Running tenders should not be on the list, it's clear that they need to be worked on. ODF delta is published, X-ray in evaluation, so is dev mentor.
* No explicit results expected in the next weeks.
* Nobody hindered to work on any item, but it's in not in top priority all board and other resources should be invested into that.
* Not doing everything at the same time.
* Organize our resources, have common understanding what's next and what comes after that.
* First step - what is missing from this list?
Topics sorted alphabetically:
(Updated during this call, so changed since LibOCon meeting)
* Accessibility
* Advisory board and cooperation
* Business entity
* App stores
* Commercial activities
* Capital investment
* Communication hints and rules for international audience
* Community bylaws
* Tooling: Community participation, tools for developers
* has to be balanced against cost of change (Thorsten)
* migration done in single steps, e.g. Easy Hacks? (Paolo)
* should be driven by developers and new dev mentor (Thorsten)
* support this (Michael)
* goal is also to get new contributors, some might find current tooling complicated (Paolo)
* Conflict of interest and tenders
* Diversity and inclusion
* Education, universities and schools
* Events, conferences, LibOCon 2021 and Hackfests, physical and virtual
* LibreOffice Online
* LibreOffice Mobile (Android and iOS)
* Marketing plan and growth and diversification of the ecosystem
* Next next decade manifesto
* Public sector: activities with e.g. Kiel, Dortmund or Treuchtlingen
* Trademark policy, branding, OpenOffice brand
* Lothar: Any urgent item not on this list?
* Goal is to have a ranking/priorities in the end, to focus resources and engagement to.
* Nobody hintered to work on other topics, but board's top priority should go on what's ranked.
* Emiliano: Can we use something similar as for tender ranking?
* Lothar: Can we re-use that, make it 1-15?
* Michael: Agree, don't make it too complicated.
* AI Florian: put items in a spreadsheet by Monday (to factor changes in), circulate for ranking, to be ranked within the next week.
Agenda items of Private part
3. Inform & Discuss: wealth management for foundation capital stock, evaluating meeting, proposal from Stephan, further steps (Stephan/Florian, Lothar, board members 10min)
Reason why in private: confidential information about finance decision making
Rational: evaluation and further steps
4. Last-minute: LibOCon update (Florian)
5. Last-minute: LOOL discussion (Thorsten)
Private meeting ends at 14:03 Berlin time.
Lothar Becker (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)