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 43 years old, and a
father of three boys. Together with my wonderful wife & fellow
LibreOffice hacker Bubli, we live in Hamburg, Germany.
My work with the project and codebase started in 2001 as a developer
(with the former OpenOffice.org community), which we then jointly took
and founded TDF & LibreOffice with in 2010. Since then, I was serving
in various roles, including my current one in the board of
directors. Since 2008 (with a brief hiatus in 2014), I'm also a member
of the OASIS ODF technical committee. As a day job, I lead a great
team of LibreOffice developers at CIB software, helping numerous
customers to run LibreOffice reliably and securely.
Why am I running?
* TDF is now a mature organization - with a certain risk of plateauing
in its initiative and impact. I'd like to help professionalize the
core operations further: towards more impact, a broader fundraising
base, and more intense partnering with other, similarly-motivated
NGOs. What I want is to have TDF stay for the long run; which also
includes adapting to changes in the software landscape like cloud
and app stores.
* Product versus project - while the world outside looks at us and
mostly sees the product 'LibreOffice' - the reason most of us are
here is because of the project. Because we like to work on our
specific areas, be that translation, marketing, QA, UX, development
or all the other sub-projects TDF is running. We should get the word
out that using software produced by a community provides unique
values, and make sure we provide effortless entries into the
community experience for every user out there.
* Diversity - while our user base is amazingly diverse, and so is our
community around translation, marketing, and native language
projects - our QA and development community is rather uniform, in a
number of metrics (gender, ethnicity, geography). That's a bit sad,
and I'd like to try if we cannot gain many more contributions by
encouraging under-represented people in those areas.
* I want to keep TDF a friendly & welcoming place - by improving on
e.g. the Code of Conduct, encouraging friendly debate, and bridging
the occasional cultural gap or language barrier. After all, for most
of us here while writing in English, this is only our 2nd or 3rd
language. TDF also has a strong culture of operating by consensus,
that I helped to shape, and would like to keep continue encouraging.
* Integrity - another topic I'm rather passionate about is preventing
unfair advantages: the board has a conflict of interest policy that
excludes directors from decision-making on items they might benefit
from; TDF now also has an established process to award contracts via
an open tendering, allowing everyone to apply.
I'd like to offer my continued help, going after the above. 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: CIB software GmbH (German software & consulting
company, member of the advisory board since
2015)
75 words candidacy statement:
I'm leading a team of LibreOffice developers at CIB, 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