Board of Directors meeting 2023-06-12

Board Discuss
#1

The Document Foundation
Board of Directors Meeting 2023-06-12
Meeting Minutes

Date: 2023-06-12
Location: Jitsi

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

In the meeting:

Board Members - Thorsten Behrens, Cor Nouws, László Németh, Paolo Vecchi, Gabor Kelemen, Emiliano Vavassori (joined later)
Board Deputy Members - Gabriel
Membership Committee Members - Uwe,
Membership Committee Substitute Members - #
Community - Helen, Jeremy, Dennis
Team - Stephan Ficht, Florian Effenberger, Hossein, Heiko, Olivier,

Representation: none

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 5 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 3.

///// Someone to start recording via Chrome /////

Florian/Thorsten

Recurring item: Publication of previous board minutes

  • board-discuss (now in Discourse)
  • tdf-members
  • wiki page for minutes
  • wiki page for decisions
  • private minutes to the MC

Any updates regarding director affiliations and substantial interests:

Would any of the directors present need to declare an interest, for any of the listed agenda items?

    1. Thorsten, Gábor, Cor
    1. Thorsten, Gábor, Cor

The public meeting commences at 16:02 UTC / 18:02 Berlin time.

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

  • Strategic goals of TDF? (Stephan)

    • lacks attention and time needed to work on them, but not forgotten (Cor)
    • agenda item for in-person board meeting in Budapest, and also for Bucharest conference
    • members of community and staff invited [to discuss], any specific questions
    • don’t know what are the strategic goals actually (Stephan)
    • we defined 6 last year (see https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1129830)
      • double number of developers
      • significantly increase contributions non-EU communities & entities
      • in 2 years, get two additional companies into the ecosystem
      • 10% of project budget decided/voted on by members
      • substantially increase diversity in the project
      • teaching LO programming & coding details be an university - computer science subject
    • first three ones urgent and important strategic goals (László)
      • doubling the number of developers
      • two new ecosystem companies within two years
      • 3rd: creating more contributions from Asia, not only from Western Europe or USA but other parts of the world
      • 4th: to create biggest FLOSS foundation of the world with stopping the arguing, the bad habits around foundation
      • other important goals
      • eg. to spending 10% of budget for some project democracy involving community or our members, especially members to decide about this amount of money
      • at OpenOffice.org times was a voting for most important developping areas in the OpenOffice.org bugchecker
      • possible to create similar for LibreOffice
      • add email addresses to get information about bug
      • eg. related to tendering would be fine to add the 10% to the ranking
      • because it is very important feedback for community members
      • most annoying problems will be resolved by the support of the foundation, all the money of that order supporters done worth of the foundation
    • two of those items you, Laszlo, that you mentioned we will deal later in this call with the budget (Thorsten)
      • we do indeed plan the draft proposal to set aside some 10% for that.
      • Heiko already mentioning/proposing to have the bugzilla voting there
      • I suspect that might something we want to reserve for members or for, let’s say, core contributors
      • on diversity or getting contributions from slightly less well represented regions the other idea is bump Outreachy
      • run Outreachy and bump the budget a little bit
      • had mentoring, students stipend honouring KJ [Klaus Jürgen Weghorn], perhaps that moving to Outreachy
      • with GSoC this year there is quite non Central Europe, non US participants there. So that seems at least under way
      • any other comments from board members to this?
    • there is another strategic item (Gabriel)
      • teaching LibreOffice programming in university
      • wrt next LibOCon discussed to have kind of partnership with Bucharest university in this direction
      • together with Hossein, Ilmari and other team members created proposal for workshop at LibOCon
      • depending on outcome of workshop partnership will continue
      • hoping for positive results after workshop
    • thanks a lot Gabriel and Hossein (Thorsten)
      • a lot of work for organizing and holding that
    • need help in this area (Hossein)
      • can work on the proposal
      • lengthy programm, covers different areas
      • need help implement ideas and provide contents
      • several things needed for partnership and gathering people
      • eg. use SDK

  • folder: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1129829

  • explanation: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/f/1129830

  • partnership w university, workshop (Gabriel)

    • need help in this area (Hossein)
      • program is lengthy
      • help too implement the idea
      • use SDK
      • focus on some areas, gather attention
      • many things related to open source
      • general ideas about open source, gerrit
    • already brought up to ESC (Thorsten)
      • having quick shout out on dev mailing list
      • I know a few people might be willing to support you there
      • lots of knowledge in the community
      • just needs some nudging

  • Budapest [board meeting] was mentioned (Paolo)

    • some board members will go there in July
    • no agenda so far
    • very close to LibOCon in Bucharest
    • when agenda will be available for those interested to what will be discussed?

  • nothing ready yet (Thorsten)

  • feel free to suggest something

  • as always for meetings 4 days deadline for invitation in advance

  • happy to hear if there is interest, suggestions

  • discuss on internal list

The public meeting ends at 16:18 UTC / 18:18 Berlin time.

Private Part

  1. Vote, Status Report, Discuss: TDF 2023 Budget Planning (tdf-board, 35 mins)

Update on budget, new items, continue planning from FOSDEM in-
person meeting

  1. Discuss: Handling of ESC projects (Paolo Vecchi, 10 mins)

  2. Discuss: Review legal budget (Paolo Vecchi, 5 mins)

  • skipped
  1. Discuss: Last minute item(s) (tdf-board, 5 mins)

Rationale: if there is time left, and anything is popping up after
sending the agenda

  • none

The private meeting ends at 17:09 UTC / 19:09 Berlin time.

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

#2

Hi Board,

good to see these goals! Who owns these objectives, how are they tracked? E.g. if the goal is to get 2 additional companies into the ecosystem and half the timeframe is over: did we add at least one additional contributing company by now?

Best Regards,

Bjoern

#3

Hi Bjoern,

/ just me.

Thanks for the compliment.
There is no clear structure (yet) for tracking the work.
The document (linked above) has brief descriptions and a link to a separate folder etc. per goal.

Nope. Alas not. In general, directors that put their names to the items early, have been quite busy with other tasks so far. Encouraging: recently Marina and various team members joined some topics. And with also a general interest in learning about the boards work, and I guess supporting it, it must be possible to make more progress.
Again wrt the specific example: that’s a challenging one. Thorsten and me recently brainstorming decided that it is in any case valuable to (start with) look at / write up, situations around ecosystem companies from the past, to draw lessons from there.
Interested to join in one or another? :whale:

#4

Hi @cornouws,

interested in all and none :wink: – Im not picking favourites, but with my day job being entirely unrelated from LibreOffice, I cant make any reliable commitments on contributing to strategic goals.

When time and opportunity meet, I will have them in mind though.

Best Regards,

Bjoern

Impressum (Legal Info) | Datenschutzerklärung (Privacy Policy)   Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.