Board of Directors Meeting 2022-10-31

Please excuse the delay.

The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2022-10-31
Meeting Minutes

Location: Jitsi

Session chair: Thorsten Behrens
Keeper of the minutes: Stephan Ficht

In the meeting:
         Board Members - Thorsten Behrens, Paolo Vecchi, Cor Nouws, Gábor Kelemen, Emiliano Vavassori, Jan Holešovský
         Board Deputy Members - Gabriel Masei
         Membership Committee Members -
         Membership Committee Substitute Members -
         Community - Simon Phipps, "bearon", "j."
         Team - Stephan Ficht, Sophie Gautier, Guilhem Moulin, Italo Vignoli

Representation: Gabriel Masei for László Németh

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.

Interests logged:
- Jan Holešovský: online
- Cor Nouws: app store
- Thorsten Behrens: online, and appstore
- Gábor Kelemen: appstore and online
- Paolo Vecchi: no personal interests! neither in Online, nor any other online office

    -- Incomplete minutes, edited manually & locally after technical issues on Nextcloud! --

## AGENDA:

### Public Part

1. Answering questions from the community (tdf-board, 5 mins)
      Rationale: Provide an opportunity for the community to ask
      questions to the board and about TDF

2. Status Report: board strategy planning work (Cor Nouws, 5 mins)

      * status update and next steps
      * based on the Milano strategy workshop
      * materials: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1129829

3. Status Report, Discuss: LibreOffice in the app stores (Florian
      Effenberger, 5 mins)

      Status report and various ongoing discussions
      * Cloph to work out a proposal, which update regime with roughly
        one year of updates (regardless of purchasing time) could work
      * one year of updates seems reasonable
      * vouchers do not scale, creating internal, staggered releases on
        the stores might do (to group users together, so timings for EOL
        can be ~independent from purchasing dates)

5. Discuss: OSI initiative on FLOSS in app stores (Thorsten, Simon, 10
      mins)

      * OSI is currently asking for input & experience from FLOSS
        projects
      * agree on who does what til when

      Simon:
       - identify people from windows, apple, playstore and other app store
       - demonstrate the burden they put on floss devs
       - prefers the full story, how ttdf managed to publish
       - tdf did not do the work - a great deal was already done (in
          partocular mac), and see off the non-complient
       - prefers an end-to-end story, how to create the libreoffice apps
         in the store
       - rather than the last few months
       - more: how the story is told, what burden is placed - to take the
         pain away
       - tdf is affiliate with osi - perfers the board to provide the
         a full case story - so they can use it as part

      paolo:
       - want to tell the story from the tdf side

      simon: corrects paolo, no - we want the full story
        - collabora/cib doing a great deal of work
        - tdf pikced it up, while it was open source

6. Vote, Discuss: Get some activity started in Brussels
      (Thorsten, Italo, 5 mins)

      * Italo made a proposal to the board
      * motion: approve this year's travel expenses from the (still
        plentiful) marketing budget
      * Result of vote: Unanimous approval.

<private>
     Italo:
      - start basic activity, informing stakeholerss in brussels
      - parliament, commission, digit, ofe
      - those structures in brussels, by particiupating at OFE meetings,
        online
      - two are physical - in brussels, and barcelona
      - workshops from digit - one in early december - around 8-10
        travels
      - start following them, and attending, reporting to the board what
        is discussed
      - then decide if actions, or investments make sense
      - murena, expressed interest
      - one of the options, be part of group of organisaitons
      - sponsoring, paying in brussels
      - simple, basic activity, before taking an action
     Simon:
      - osba and fairphone - osi also engaging actively
        - sending member of staff, to educate MP
        - FSFE also hired one
        - there's a group of floss orgs - tdf exceptionally welcome
        - how to best apply ourselves - our enimies well funded &
          resourced
        - having italo in the room, is great, coordinated messaging
        - arrange education opportunities, to educate legistlater
          - leverage AB, to
     Paolo:
      - also connected with OFE, and the commission
        - doing education
        - digital market act
        - for himself - from his position, working there
</private>

7. Status Report, Discuss: Atticization of Online (tdf-board, 10 mins)

      * ESC provided evaluation
      * discussed briefly on the dev list:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-October/089485.html
      * conclusion seems to be: not enough activity to keep out of the
        attic for the moment
      * auto-atticize according to

https://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/board-discuss/2022/msg00744.html ?

      paolo: no influence on the matter, since being under investigation
      thorsten: lets not overdo it
      paolo: lets remove any influence at all
      Cor: proposal is about sane repos, not about blocking development people complaining promised development but didn't deliver
      emiliano: leaves, not sharing the ideas listed before
      paolo: never properly discussed and agreed
      thorsten: lets find devs. this is our task
      paolo: this is a policital issue - certain items coming up
       - the history is not black and white
       - policial issue - when pushing for it, people would get annoyed
       - recommends to do something useful
       - fixing the personal interest
       - takes months to deal with accusations for him for months
       - drop talking about online - review with conflict of interest
       - so we avoid all the mistakes

     guilhelm:
      - we've repos on gerrit, read-only
      - not obvious, that repo is deprecated
      - does not know, if the atticisation is the right / easiest way
      - if the argument is: not maintained
        - don't want it in write mode
     thorsten:
      - only thing I care - it is clear its not maintained
     paolo:
      - put a readme where libo is now - review atticisation policy now
     stephan:
      - a lot of energy wasted to put it to atticisation
      - why put that much energy to put it into the attic?
     cor:
      - not against looking at Guilhems idea
      - but - no reason to change anything in the atticization process

paolo: waiting for dev proposal, can vote then
kendy: not ready

### Private Part

8. Status Report: HR topic (Florian Effenberger, Stephan Ficht, 5 mins)
      Reason for privacy: HR, tax and legal topics.

9. Status Report: Hiring QA analyst (Florian Effenberger, Gabor Kelemen, 5 mins)
      Status QA Analyst hiring process.
      Reason for privacy: HR, tax and legal topics.

10. Status Report: Reporting from the oversight groups (Thorsten Behrens, tdf-board, 5 mins)
       Reason for privacy: HR, tax and legal topics.
       * Second quarter for the new board is up, so let's hear reports
         from the various oversight groups.

11. Discuss: Last minute item(s) (tdf-board, 5 mins)
       Rationale: if there is time left, and anything is popping up after
       sending the agenda

finished: 19:08

Note:
The minutes were unfortunately lost for technical reasons, so there are no official minutes, here above are some transcripts from participants.

Thorsten Behrens (Session chair)
Stephan Ficht (Keeper of the minutes)