The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2021-11-05
Meeting Minutes
Location: Jitsi
Session chair: Lothar Becker
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht
In the meeting:
Board - Lothar Becker, Emiliano Vavassori, Thorsten Behrens, Michael
Meeks, Cor Nouws
Board Deputies - Paolo Vecchi, Nicolas Christener
Membership Committee -
Membership Committee Deputies -
Community - Michael Weghorn
Team - Stephan Ficht, Sophie Gautier, Ilmari Lauhakangas
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 or represented in 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 13:03 Berlin time.
Public Part
1. Q&A: Answering questions from the community (all, 10 minutes)
Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask questions
to the board and about TDF
+ any Q'? (Lothar)
2. Information: Short report on an invitation to be
present as TDF in a meeting of a digital ministry about their shift to
open source (Thorsten, Lothar 5min)
Rationale: Share information about learned status and role of
LibreOffice in this project/environment and a planed additional 1:1
meeting as follow on of the last year's meeting
+ in Germany different levels of initiatives to bring government to
open source (Lothar)
+ one initiative from federal state
+ decision in the state government in favor of open source
+ for office sw
+ cloud based products (Thorsten)
+ C'bora on the cloud side, client side is LibreOffice
+ VIS document management system integration, seems working
+ rolled out in ~100 places, going soon in one ministery
+ special solutions choosen because can be modulized (Lothar)
+ using standard file formats, ODF
+ very intereting meeting scheduled next monday
+ some questions from federal state
+ should be a contact with the ecosystem to improve the core
+ will hint to whole ecosystem for doing such things
+ have to be in contact w. ecosystem companies
+ discussing technical stuff on monday (Thorsten)
+ political will to try things
+ generally very encouraging development
+ what devices to use? (Nicolas)
+ usual client hardware (Lothar)
+ their service provider is trying to support all kinds of
H/W across Germany
+ are open to new ways of working
+ 25k computers published on joinup (Paolo)
+ interesting project
3. Status: AI from board meeting 08th of October: conducting a proposal
with a change from the "temporal freeze" to an "attic"-status of the
LOOL repository (Emiliano, Thorsten, all 10min)
Rationale: Status of the action item, timeline for decision making
on that
+ idea was to have a frame (Lothar)
+ what actual status?
+ not the first project to do it (Thorsten)
+ taking pages out of other project's books
+ brainstorming around naming: is 'attic' or 'freezer' good?
+ kicking around thoughts there; not yet ready to vote on etc.
+ a fair summary - trying to define details (Emiliano)
+ exchanged understandings
+ perhaps ready in a short time
+ when to bring it on the Agenda (Lothar)
AI: bring proposal to next BoD call (Thorsten, Emiliano)
+ Attic is not necessarily the definitive state of the project
(Emiliano)
+ possibility that it is revived within some boundaries
+ brought into the normal flow of working in TDF there
+ is implied here - Apache has this (Thorsten)
+ defined gating criteria to get out of the attic again
+ needs to be critical mass, and very likely an active
community around the project
Public meeting ends at 13:26 Berlin time.
Private Part
4. Discuss & further steps: New answers from law firm, resume and
follow on with items, timeline (all 10min)
Rationale: Discussion on understanding and consequences for
app-store offerings and bizz entity, what from the advice should be and
can be shared
Reason why in private: Discussion about legal text from law firm for
aspects of offering alternatives and organizational items
5. Discuss: CoI policy
Rationale: Discussing and understanding a version of the
policy,defining where to ask legal advice and how to do that
Reason why in private: preliminary wordings of a legal text for
rules of procedure
Private meeting ends at 14:00 Berlin time
Lothar Becker (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)