Hi there,
Just a quick note to say that I intend to run again for a seat
on the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. Like Franklin,
self-nomination feels uncomfortable as a concept, but lets try:
* Who am I ?
I'm Michael Meeks: Christian, Husband, Hacker, 40 years old, I try to
shepherd Collabora Productivity. My day job is to try to rapidly grow
the economic ecosystem around LibreOffice for the benefit of all
including Collabora. That means encouraging more people to pay for
more features, fixes, testing, translation & other goodness to go into
LibreOffice and accelerate the virtuous circle of its growth. I also
love to hack on the code where I can, and to mentor and include new
people.
I started poking at the code-base before it was open-sourced in 2000,
and have served with the team creating LibreOffice from the very
beginning in various technical and non-technical roles: inside the
Engineering Steering Committee, as a Board member, and primarily as a
code contributor, mentor and evangelist.
* Why am I running?
I'd like to continue to offer the benefits of a whole career's worth
of mistakes, blunders, mis-understandings, failures (mostly my own)
and occasional successes (mostly other people's). I can also type at a
reasonable speed, and scribe interactive minutes of calls with
reasonable accuracy, helping to make meeting decisions somewhat
clearer in retrospect. I've also had the privilege of being involved
in the creation, hiring, management & bootstrapping of several teams
of both paid and unpaid developers over the years - which is perhaps
useful as TDF continues to grow and invest.
I also believe it is critical for us to continue to safeguard our
can-do and relational culture, empowering individuals to make friends
and get things done while resisting distrust, un-necessary process
creep and bureaucracy as we grow. One of my goals is to try to
encourage TDF towards being a fluid and adaptive organisation, always
open to new and better ideas, new participants and new and better ways
of doing things.
Finally - I'm a believer in Free Software and also critically
interested in ensuring that TDF remains a great place for companies to
invest and sell services around improving the software. I'm committed
to making sure the right conditions remain in place to help them to
contribute effectively back to the project and work well together with
volunteers around the common codebase.
Full name: Michael Meeks
Email: michael.meeks@collabora.com
Corporate affiliation: Collabora
* 75 word formal candidacy:
I'd love to serve you again on the board: as a FLOSS advocate, with
passion for LibreOffice, deep TDF board knowledge, lots of generic
business experience: legal, budgeting, interviewing, management, yet
also eager to keep LibreOffice fun and free. I've a long history of
contribution to different FLOSS communities in various ways, am
currently betting the business on LibreOffice and its success, but
also want to help growing our volunteer participation.
* Happy to answer any questions of course.
Regards,
Michael.