Dear Community, Members of the TDF, and Membership Committee,
I currently serve as a director on the board of The Document
Foundation, and I would like to run again.
My full name is Thorsten Behrens, as of today I'm 47 years
old. Together with my wonderful wife & fellow LibreOffice hacker
Bubli and my 3 sons, we live in Hamburg, Germany.
My work with the project and codebase started in 2001 as a developer
(with the then-OpenOffice.org community), which we jointly took and
founded TDF & LibreOffice with in 2010. Since then, I was serving in
various roles, including my current one on the board of
directors. From 2008 to 2020, I was also a member of the OASIS ODF
technical committee. Since 2021, I'm honoured to lead a great team of
LibreOffice developers at my company allotropia software, helping
numerous customers to run LibreOffice reliably and securely.
Why am I running?
* quite a few things that I wanted to pursue during the past board
term do show some progress - but there's just so much left to do:
* on the growing TDF impact and further professionalising front - the
success story is us finally filling the developer mentor role. I
helped with the interviews & selection process, and am looking
forward to those efforts now bearing fruit. Still, my focus areas
from last time remain almost unmodified, since I believe there's
much left to be done:
- further increase our mentoring & community building efforts
- continue the push to have LibreOffice available everywhere it
matters, especially on app stores
- tap into grants and funding TDF is uniquely positioned to attract
* Diversity - sadly this is an area where this term again saw little
progress. With dev mentoring capacity now revving up, I'm confident
a next board has more opportunity there to lift people up though. I
would like to continue pushing that. At the same time, we must not
forget to retain, nurture and celebrate our existing contributors,
and remain an attractive and fun place to contribute to for
everyone.
* Integrity - I was talking about conflict of interest policy two
years ago, and thanks to pushes from Marina and the MC, we now have
explicit rules for both bodies in place. The topic remains very
close to my heart, since its all about playing fair. At the same
time, when it comes to displaying integrity as a charity to our
donors and the outside world at large, more remains to be done. I'd
love to continue pushing e.g. for TDF being occasionally audited,
and eventually receiving a Charity Seal (certifying effectiveness &
efficiency, as well as transparency).
If you have any questions, about my person or the ideas above, please
do reach out in public or in private!
Full name: Thorsten Behrens
Email: thb@libreoffice.org
Corporate affiliation: allotropia software GmbH (German software &
consulting company, member of the advisory board
since 2021), owner and CEO
75 words candidacy statement:
I'm leading a team of LibreOffice developers at allotropia software,
and am a long-time TDF contributor to both code and
organisation. Serving in the current board as a director, I would like
to offer my continued help for the next two years. Things I promise to
do: improve & professionalize organisation; grow & diversify
contribution; keep things fun, fair & sustainable; and help with the
largely-German administrative grunt work.
Kind regards,
-- Thorsten