Budget 2025 planning

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!

1 Like

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.

So, reading (the tea leaves, and) @floeff 's response on the thread with the developer hiring proposals - I seem to be reading a threat to “punish” Collabora, couched in proposal to supposedly spend excess funds.

Why would I say that?

  • Listed among the propoals here are proposals for ongoing expenses - hiring developers for permanent positions.
  • The ‘heaviest’ of these proposals is 4 extra developers for web/online and mobile development.
  • The TDF has not experienced a significant increase in annual income recently, it has merely been unable to expend the usual income the way it used to, creating a surplus/releserve. Thus, hiring developers means changing the regular budget.
  • The part of the regular budget which is traded away - possibly permanently - in favor of the new developers is the tenders budget; and the excuse will be (not actual quote): “We have less than two bidders, maybe even just one, so how can we have tender?”. @floeff only says there will be no tenders in 2025, but what I believe is implied is that there will be no procurement of work from Collabora/Allotropia in a non-tender format, nor will there be a tendering budget in 2026 or later - by the same arguments; and possibly, next year, this would be hard to revert, if people have already been hired.

Am I being overly conspiratorial? Possibly; but the proposals and the rhetoric seem to fit.

So, on procedural principle, I believe that proposals for ongoing expenses like extra developers in non-time-limited capacity must be tabled (= no longer be discussed) in context of spending the budget surplus, and that the discussion be conducted under the assumption that Collabora/Allotropia can be contracted to do work on LibreOffice.

I seem to be reading a threat to “punish” Collabora

Why would the board invest time and energy to, as you say, „punish“ Collabora? That seems to suggest Collabora is the center of the board’s universe and it has nothing else to do, which seems quite weird.

Maybe rather the board thinks TDF‘s mission can be fulfilled in a better way by having competence inhouse? Conspiracy theories are not always helpful.

1 Like

Interesting, Eyal. Consider what we’ve done over the years:

  • Promoted Collabora contributions in LO major press releases
  • Promoted Collabora contributions in LO videos (with hundreds of thousands of views)
  • Promoted Collabora contributions in Advisory Board calls
  • Promoted Collabora contributions in slide decks given at talks
  • Reposted Collabora social media messages about their contributions to LibreOffice
  • Added a prominent link on the Download page pointing to a page that promotes Collabora as a provider
  • Done interviews with Collabora staff talking about their contributions
  • etc. etc. etc.

Yet as soon as TDF does something for TDF and for the benefit of all LibreOffice users, rather than worrying what a company in the ecosystem thinks, it’s now “punishing” in your view. What a strange perspective given all TDF has done to promote Collabora over the years.

Another reason to put TDF first now.

Not sure about that long list, some of these items are kind of disingenuous, e.g. “promoted collabora contributions” - those aren’t promotions of Collabora, they’re promotions of LO, and the credit is given to individuals; and when it comes to “slides at talks” - that is paid sponsorship of LibOCon, plus, we actually denied Allotropia that at the last minute last year. Of course, I don’t believe TDF should be promoting Collabora much, so I would actually be concerned if that whole list was something we really have done as in your description.

The thing is, @mikesaunders , there is no dichotomy between vigorous-promotion and punishment; nor do any of the actions you mentioned balance punitive action.

So, hiring a11y and RTL/CTL/CJK-focused developers was apparently not something “for TDF and the benefit of all users”, but hiring 4 (!) developers for web/mobile LO - is? That’s not a serious argument, just grandstanding.

And no less problematic than the choice of focus in this proposition, is the presentation of such hiring as an allocation of funds from reserves, under the title of “projects”.


It’s kind of amazing that after being annoyed and concerned with the way an “ecosystem-heavy” BoD was running things, with long arguments with Cor on our mailing list, we now find myself having to defend those people whose conduct I have found quite problematic - from often-underhanded jabs and reprisals, whether symbolic or material. Instead of trying to reduce partisanship and use the trust you had received as a BoD to create an atmosphere of trust and fairness, you’ve chosen what can be described as capricious partisanship.

Anyway, at the bottom line: I strongly oppose the conversion of most/all of the outside-contracted-work part of our budget to a developer employment budget.

Oh, and, PS - This budgetay planning should have happened in late 2024, not mid 2025. Please do the next board the courtesy of planning a budget for 2026 budget before the end of your term early next year. Of course the next BoD might want to make certain changes, but let those be over a worked-out baseline.

No, we give talks at many other events, online and in-person too – nothing to do with sponsorship. In those talks we’ve promoted the ecosystem a lot.

Hi Eyal,

I’m not sure if advocating for TDF to do direct assignment of development work to one company and its subsidiary is a good thing knowing about the current situation as well as being potentially seen by other eventual bidders as a message to stay away as anyway things have been already decided.

What you call partisanship is actually a realignment to the “independent” bit of the statutes that has been ignored for such a long time while some focused on the “meritocratic” bit to influence the governance in ways that, as we have seen, turned out not to be aligned with the laws and regulations that take priority over the statutes.

Investing in developers that will be funded not only by donations but also by applying for funding specific project through the various funding mechanisms was important years ago and it is even more important now that the pool of potential bidders for tenders is limited to one company and its subsidiary.

You might remember that in the in-house developers proposal I referenced the risks related to a reduction of contributions and contributors:

The company and its subsidiary have their own business interests to think about and they are paid by their customers to develop what their customers need leaving TDF, and potential additional commercial contributors, with plenty of work in many areas to keep all of us busy for decades to come.

So once again, you might see “capricious partisanship” while others see a plan for growth for TDF in terms of contributions and reach as well as the creation of a level playing field for all where other potential commercial contributors can develop their own business models without imposing limitations on TDF, its mission and goals.

Ciao

Paolo

so if TM = MT, what the sense of

?

to put it bluntly : a repeated tendancy to vagueness and delay.

there’s quite often another responsible, another reference, another timeline … instead of fixing immediate, obvious points.

yep. maybe.
maybe someone knowledgeable / responsible will at some point feel responsible enough to analyze and answer this person direclty.
maybe.

and what is done to improve the situation … ?

and what is done to sort out the curiosity … ?

No need to anwer here, but defintely updating the referenced redmine, bugzilla and weblate would be a minimum consideration for volunteering community members.

especially in the current context with this decision to remove a tagline … :thinking:

A translation memory is a memory of the strings we have already translated (you can see it in the wiki too) while automatic translation will translate any strings (like DeepL does). LibreTranslate would be a great help for new translators given the amount of strings the UI and help contain.

So your example was 166411 – German translation of "compound character/word" is not understandable which is Status: NEEDINFO. Who esle than the original poster will give those informations? And you pointed to the German Redmine where I don’t see the issue reported. I think only the German community who is made of volunteers as well, will be able to answer if they are aware of the issue.
We are a volunteer driven community. Not all volunteers are attracted by the same areas and they dedicate their time as they see fit.

Speaking of your example again: one person has triaged the issue (you), so somebody felt reponsible/knowledgeable. By the way, I don’t know what info you expect from the reporter.

Be patient, because as translators, we are all volunteers and deal with suggestions when we can. For example at the moment, with the preparation of 25.8, all forces are concentrated on finishing UI and help files together with a first QA session. So maybe in September, the situation will be better :slight_smile:

Find the responsible persons here FindTheExpert - The Document Foundation Wiki

You’re part of a volunteer community, yet depending also on other volunteers. Do we need more volunteers, yes, always (as in any open source project). What do we do to get more volunteers? The marketing team is working daily on the topic and several others in the team in their respective areas. Ilmari, for example, gives mentoring sessions each day, either collectively or individually.
If you have more ideas, you’re welcome to suggest them on the marketing project or I’m sure Mike will answer you if you ping him.

I don’t see what the Community tag has to do with adding automatic translations to Weblate in the budget.

someone else may.
or may not.
maybe.