Budget 2025 planning

I’m not happythat decisions on this scale are made with 6 days’ notice since the RFC about them. I’ll also note that the Florian’s summary suggests that my suggestions did not even come up (?)

But - I’ll try to hang on to the last italicized sentence and pretend nothing is decided in any way.

So, in the mean time, let me comment on the “projects from the past” and “new projects” which Florian listed.

0. Developer hirings; “Developer for” UI, MacOS, Python, Base, Online, Mobile

Moved this up. We were talking about disbursing a pile of money, not a long-term budgetary commitment - right? So, how do these suggestions fit with that principle? Are you planning on hiring people for a pre-determined amount of time, or in permanent positions?

Anyway, I am against taking such a decision without a longer discussion - involving trustees and developers - about such potential positions. Bake it before you serve it up.

If it’s fixed-term employment, then - I think perhaps a very concrete possibility is hiring someone to work on tabbed UI and the other UI modes, perhaps even resulting in a more generally-usable customizable-ribbon-like UI library. But of course, this too is a half-baked idea.

I’ll also mention I have no idea why we need a “Python developer”. Is that a developer for improving Python support for writing macros/extensions? Or a developer to work on LO code that’s in Python?

1. The P2P LibreOffice project

Simon’s idea got a blog post and also a positive discussion thread here on discourse. Is this the item named “Research and development of collaborative editing features based on open standards”? That’s really underselling it. This is a great idea and a chance to 1-up other office suite providers.

2. MC request: Improvements on the Membership Committee tooling; MC request: TDF welcome kit for the members

I’d probably support this, but - why haven’t we seen the request anywhere? If this has been sent to the BoD only and not disclosed to us, this is yet another violation of the statutory obligation to conduct TDF affairs transparently.

3. 2-4% budget to FLOSS software as devprojects or support

2-4% out of what? The regular expenses? The annual budget? The amount of money we have left?

Anyway, if this is considered, I expect the choice of projects, and the writing of rules for making the choice, not to be carried out by the BoD, as it has proven itself incapable of managing such duties fairly and without strong bias.

4. Update & translate LibreLogo manual, complete LibreLogo unit tests

I remember this is a plugin that Laszlo wrote, right? But - I don’t see why TDF funds should be spent on this.

5. [MC] Carbon compensation; Hardware for members; LibreTranslate Improvement; Integrating Hetzner cloud to Jenkins; JA community; five tenders plus costs for external experts; two legal items; two HR items; LibreOffice Roadshow

What do these mean?

6. 10% project budget for members

You mean, 10% of the sum gets decided not by the BoD, but by a decision of the trustees in general? I’m in favor. The thing is, it’s not a project, it’s a meta-suggestion. Also, I’d increase it to a lot more of the sum we have now.

7. BugZilla release funding

Generally support this, but - I would like to see the report on how our previous tranche of funding was put to use. Did we get any reporting about the use of our funds?

8. [MC] Training on the reform of foundation law changes incl. BoD

I believe this is subsubmed by my wider suggestion regarding making information available and accessible about our German legal environment.

I will say that it should not be assumed that this needs to happen in-person-only.

9. trademark filings

Asking informatively: Why would it be useful for us to file for trademarks? And if it would, why have we not done so yet?

10. In-person strategy workshop 2024-2026

For whom? And what kind of strategy? Anyway, given the state of affairs at the TDF I’m not sure this would work out so well.

11. Outreachy

What about it? Do we pay “per capita” there somehow?

12. Graphic design work for great visuals for website, socials, blog posts and marketing

We just funded that…

13. Bug Bounty Program

Is this realistic? That is, is there a significant number people who know LO well enough to pursue these bounties, but can’t be bothered to do LO work without the monetary incentive?

14. Aptos font replacement

Have we really even put Carlito and Caladea to use in LibreOffice at all? I mean, I’d like a metrically-compatible font, but I can’t say in fairness that it’s not just throwing money away. Moreover, we can just make non-free fonts available anyway, legally. This has been discussed as bug 159950.

15. SBOM

I vaguely remember a talk about this, but I’m not sure if it was in an LOCon or else. Anyway, why would this cost us any significant amount of money? Is this different than, basically, the list of our build dependencies?

16. Extensions for local/remote access of Open Source LLMs/SLMs

I’m not convinced we should be encouraging this stuff in the first place.

17. LATAM Conference, LibreOffice Asia Conference

You mean, funding a conference which would otherwise not happen? Or contributing funding to a conference that would happen anyway?

At any rate, I always feel that it’s not quite fair that the annual conference is always in Europe. I realize I might not be able to attend an annual LibOCon in LATAM, and funding for people to travel there from EMEA is not very realistic, but still.

18. TDF hosted open source LLM

I don’t think so.

Some topics are excellent for a workshop…

To clarify, it is a UI developer, it’s just that the macOS stuff, as confirmed by Patrick, is usually about UI and thus should be included in the role.

Yes, we got reporting about it and I kept track of the code commits while they happened. You have personally received a report about this yesterday. To quote from that with some links for clarity: “Everything on that list except for the 5.1/5.3 → harmony migration has been done over the last two years or so, and at this point, this PR is handling the bulk of that migration code, which means as soon as this lands, we’re racing towards the finish line.”

The “what” is about funding it. The “how” is by planning for four interns. The final sum might be lower in case we can’t find enough capable interns.

This is about security issues. We already ran a program like this with external funding in 2022.

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I think this is something @marinello can answer, whether it’s feasible or not. Might be it’s too much overhead, but I don’t know enough details to judge this.

A while ago, the team began to collect all tenders TDF did in the past. Based on this spreadsheet, in the period from 2020 to 2022, a total of 11 tenders are listed, amongst them one not LibreOffice-related. Out of the ten remaining tenders, there is only one where a company not represented in the board bid. Net sum listed is 293.347,70 €, so TDF cost then likely is 19% more, 349.083,763 €.

From 2014 to 2019, there were 19 tenders. Three of them were not LibreOffice-related (but not awarded per the spreadsheet either). From the remaining 16 tenders, one seems an unawarded one we tried again, 5 had bidders that were not from companies with members in the board. One of these 5 tenders was awarded with a bigger share to a company represented in the board, with a smaller share to another company. Another one was awarded not to the third-party bidder, but to one of the companies with members in the board. The total net sum listed for all the 2014-2019 tenders is 289.916,00 €, so TDF cost then likely is 19% higher and equals to 345.000,04 €.

I’ve changed the macOS developer line item now to “Developer for macOS with a focus on User Interface” to make it more clear hopefully.

Mine was just an idea based on what I know of the Membership Committee tool. Of course, if any adaptation is needed, we will continue with the manual tool.

I’ve replied to some of your proposals, and for #4, as written, I will look into providing some more details. For the other proposals, at this time of the year and stage of the budget, it is tough to add something that neither has someone who drives it, nor a concrete budget sum. We urgently need to finalize the budget now.

Several months ago, I think @italovignoli reached out the various projects asking for budget proposals, it’s not that everything happened in just 6 days. That would be ambitious. :wink:

If there is a great, actionable idea that comes up after the budget is done, we can always look into it and make it happen, but I would not propose to further delay the budget, otherwise we’ll never finish it.

That depends on how the project is structured and how the candidates apply. Some tasks fit short-term, project-based roles, other fit long-term roles. The developer hiring is in discussion and not finalized, so can’t make a binding answer to that. However, I understand our goal is to retain competence in house, which advocates a bit against too short-term commitments.

See the PDF in this thread.

That’s the proposal for a tax office-compatible description if the item, yes.

That project has been ongoing work for a longer time, probably even predates your membership at TDF: Tender to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling (#202105-01) - The Document Foundation Blog

The budget we spend, although the description is by now a bit outdated maybe.

Will you send a candidacy for coordinating this and let the members vote on it? Information on experience in German tax regulations as well as the insurance coverage sum would be helpful too.

We remove this item indeed.

  • Carbon compensation is just that, we compensate for our travels and running infrastructure.
  • Hardware for members is hardware members can use, e.g. for QA and development. In the past we bought e.g. HiDPI screens for people working on 4K elements.
  • On LibreTranslate, @sophi can give some details.
  • We run our hardware on Hetzner cloud, and as I understand, the plan was to connect our Jenkins instance to their cloud API to monitor, create and remove machines on the fly.
  • The Japanese community sent budget requests, which we’ve merged into the community and marketing budgets.
  • Five tenders were proposed (I think by @htietze or @x1sc0) and we considered those, but withdrew them, so did we withdrew the cost for external experts to independently assess these tenders.
  • Two legal items are things that cannot be disclosed yet. One is about a domain name, another one about registering one trademark.
  • Two HR items are items concerning freelancers or employees.
  • For the LibreOffice roadshow, I think @elianedomingos can give some detials.

Well, it’s mid-June, the year is halfway over, we’ve seen not many proposals yet, so increasing it does not make much sense, because it’s unlikely we will actually spend the money in 2025.

Remotely is even more demanding due to the timezones, but even organizing a virtual meeting for like 20-30 people is nearly impossible at the moment.

We actually do have trademarks in the foundation assets, but over the course of time, new ideas and therefore ideas for registering trademarks come to mind.

Was intended for board, MC and team, and it’s removed from the budget, as indeed hard to conduct right now.

That’s why it is in the budget actually. :wink:

@italovignoli proposed this. I proposed to remove it for now, because I think it’s unlikely to happen in 2025.

We don’t have enough insight on it, so we might need an external consultancy on it if we are to implement it.

That’s why it has been removed from the budget.

These are conferences organized by our community, so they are less likely to happen if we don’t fund them. It’s not a third-party conference that happens anyways.

Neither does the board, this is why the budget item was removed.

I’ve shared the updated budget draft with the accountant to have a look as well. We can always add further changes, but this way we can work a bit in parallel (and spot possible errors early on).

Thank you for your comment.

LibreOffice Asia Conference 2025 is scheduled for December in Tokyo.

Our local team is currently consulting with potential venues, and we’ll likely be able to hold the conference on December 13–14. We expect to have a definite answer by early July. Since we are planning to use a company’s seminar room free of charge, the dates may change if they have other scheduling needs.

I basically requested two rooms. One will be used for the Gnome Asia Summit.

I am about to start preparing for the CFP call. As soon as the venue is decided, we will start the CFP call.

As for the budget, the actual expenses are expected to vary. In particular, since most of the cost will be for travel, it will depend on how many speaker slots we have and where the speakers are coming from.

The purpose is to add LibreTranslate to Weblate, this is something requested for a long time by some translators:

For references:

  • as a first step we will use their API (with a request to get more translations per minute)
  • then we will have to prepare our files
  • then we will have to train our own models

Any help with this process is welcome!

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like when ?

in what form ?

Issues - Native Language - The Document Foundation Redmine :thinking:

to wiki.documentfoundation.org wouldn’t hurt as well :expressionless:

I agree that it would be of great help also for the wiki, provided there is still a review of the translation.

As for when it was requested, see the issue you pointed and Olivier opened. At that time we didn’t want to use Google, but now that LibreTranslate is there and seems functional, we should give it a try.

Either on preparing the files or train our own models. Would you be interested to participate?

What I see from the 2022-10-17 Board minutes:

Indeed, it is quite sad that it is apparently to be buried.
At the time it was considered important to get members of TDF more involved.
A missed opportunity so far.

+1

Since we are in “Board discuss”, I hope we have a concrete follow up.

matter of clicks ?
Automatic suggestions - Weblate 5.12 documentation

sure,
again hoping it’s not just a rhetorical question.

PS.
food for thoughts (and hopefully concrete action) : 166411 – German translation of "compound character/word" is not understandable

" Eight months ago, I’ve provided some proposals to improve this, but it seems that at translations.documentfoundation.org is not actively processing proposals. "

(and please read the whole history to concretely understand what volunteers may endure :innocent: )

Indeed, it is quite sad that it is apparently to be buried.
At the time it was considered important to get members of TDF more involved.
A missed opportunity so far.

Look at it from the budget perspective. In particular in the current
situation, we need to have a budget that can be realistically spent.
Carrying over unused budget items from the past years (the one you
mention is several years old) would not be perceived well by the
authorities.

It is mid-June, so the likelihood of being able to execute on it finally
this year is getting much lower.

For the budget, we repeatedly reach out to the community. So the
question is, why would a vote on the 10% community budget give different
feedback and interactions than the general question for the budget? You
can see it also differently: We received several requests from the
community, like funding for events, and we approved all of those,
without even a vote needed. :slight_smile:

The idea to remove the budget is not to bury the idea. If there is a
good proposal, even after the budget is approved, I am sure the board is
more than happy to approve it. However, keeping a placeholder in the
budget for years, that has never been really used, is not wise in terms
of accounting and timely use of funds.

But we already have automatic suggestions via translation memory, sorry, but I don’t understand your question.

I dont’ see the relation, maybe this person should talk on the german list or join the German translators.

Question: What is the “again” in “again hoping it’s not just a rhetorical question.” Did you post on the l10n list or elsewhere and we missed to answer you?
What did you have to endure as a volunteer?

From what I understand on the thread you highlighted, the German community didn’t reply to the wrong translation of “compound character/word”? Am I right?

On the suggestions, each l10n team is responsible to process them. Sometimes there is only one person doing the translation in the team and dealing with a lot of anonymous suggestions is just a nightmare. So a solution here could be to join the German community and make a proposal on the list. Or also post on the l10n list to alert the translator. In any case, translators are not used to use bugzilla and curiously I was not in cc.

I think it’s the heart of the issue on several comments here, maybe we should have underlined that the tag is not because it’s a wrong idea, or the board doesn’t support it or it should not pursue the proposal.

But we have a budget to finalize and we have to put realistic realization in it, that should be done through 2025, otherwise it’s just an empty shell.

So as Florian said, if the item find enough support from community, with detailed actions and a sum attached to it, no problem to add it to the current budget. And if too late, it will go to the next year budget.

But I don’t know what part of the work was due to our funding. Anyway, JustDave says we can expect a release of 6.0 in 2025 :slight_smile: :muscle:

Then I’m very supportive. Interns are likely to continue involvement in some capacity after their internship ends, and to “spread the word”; are somewhat likely to continue doing development work; and also somewhat likely to attract other developers. But like other things, I want funding to be tied to proper reporting, properly filed and disseminated in an orderly fashion to the trustees (i.e. not just a discourse post), say at yearly intervals and after the funded activity is over. Of course that’s not a comment to you but to the BoD.

And did that work? Were we satisfied with the investment vs. benefits? Plus, I’ll again harp on the weak or no availability of reports on concluded funded activity.